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The rebellious young split their votes between the parties of the left (P.R.D.) and the right (P.A.N.)--anybody but the Establishment P.R.I. In a recent poll of Mexicans from 18 to 24, only 1% said they trust the government, making them even more restive than their U.S. counterparts, known as Generation X. "Disgust, nonconformity--it's all there," says Guillermo Martinez, 24, "youth reporter" for the national Radio Red network. "I don't see the current system surviving us."
The revolt got rolling in the last federal election, three years ago, when 52% of voters from 18 to 29 chose opposition parties--among students, the figure was 65%--placing Mexican youth in the forefront of a political movement that has spread to older age groups. This time, close to 70% of the 18-to-29-year-olds rejected the ruling party, and droves of 30-to-49-year-olds decided to join the younger folks.
As a result, Mexico seemed transformed, suddenly but peacefully, from what Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa once called "the perfect dictatorship" to a pluralistic society. Thanks in large part to Zedillo's own sweeping electoral reforms--which did much last week to end Mexico's long tradition of ballot-box fraud--the government should at last be subject to genuine checks, balances and debate. Even foreign investors, irritated in recent years by the whims of P.R.I. rule, reacted enthusiastically: the ever shaky peso strengthened the morning after the votes were counted. In an interview with TIME, Cardenas, who may have had the 1988 presidential election stolen from him by the P.R.I., insisted that "no one will again rule Mexico with a wave of his hand."
But the revolution is not complete, and the country may or may not be ready for the messy give-and-take of democratic politics. Cardenas and the P.R.D. have more experience in protesting than in governing, while the P.R.I. and its legion of local bosses cannot be counted out. The acrimony among the three major parties--the by-product of a half-century's struggle for democratization--may yield little more than governmental gridlock over the next few years, particularly since the 2000 presidential election is now wide open. Still, says Sergio Aguayo, head of the government watchdog group Civic Alliance, "we at least have the opportunity to become a new country. Before last Sunday we didn't have that."
Aguayo credits the NAFTA generation with helping create this opportunity. "It's going to be very hard to fool this generation," he says. The youthful enthusiasm for change--any change--has nonideological roots. The young are prematurely jaded by the political corruption that keeps blackening Mexico's image. And they are fed up with the country's seemingly endless economic malaise. Since childhood, they have known only spasms of prosperity interrupted by one financial disaster after another, from the 1982 foreign-debt debacle to the 1994 peso crash, which triggered Mexico's worst recession in 60 years. Pablo Raphael, 27, a novice restaurateur whose hip El Octavo Dia is a favorite Mexico City hangout, defines himself and his peers as "the crisis generation"--quite an admission, since Raphael is the nephew of former Mexican President and P.R.I. stalwart Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado.