Head of Government of the Federal District

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search
Mexico

This article is part of the series:
Politics and government of
Mexico



Other countries · Atlas
 Politics Portal
view  talk  edit

The Head of Government (Spanish: Jefe de Gobierno) wields executive power in the Mexican Federal District. The Head of Government serves a six-year term, running concurrently with that of the President of the Republic. The federal district, or D.F., is the seat of national executive, legislative, and judicial power, and is largely contiguous with the core of the sprawling Mexico City conurbation.

According to Article 122 of the Constitution, "the Head of Government of the Federal District shall be responsible for executive power and public administration in the district and shall be represented by a single individual, elected by universal, free, direct, and secret suffrage."

The title is commonly rendered in English as "Mayor of Mexico City" or (less frequently) as "Governor of the Federal District" (as the position was known in the early post-Revolution years), but in reality the position does not correspond exactly to either the mayor of a municipality (presidente municipal) or the governor of a state (gobernador) as they are understood in Mexican law.

For the greater part of the 20th century, the D.F. was administered directly by the President of the Republic, who delegated his authority to an appointed Head of the Federal District Department, known more commonly (and tersely) as the Regente ("Regent" in English). This non-democratic imposition was a source of constant and often bitter resentment among the inhabitants of Mexico City. Under the reforms of the state introduced by presidents Carlos Salinas and Ernesto Zedillo, the Regent was replaced by the first directly elected Head of Government in 1997.

On 6 July 1997, with a 47.7% share of the vote in an eight-horse race, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas won the first direct Head of Government election (this first term was to last only three years, to bring the office into line with the presidential succession). Cárdenas, a former presidential candidate who was, according to many, cheated out of victory in the closely fought 1988 presidential election, later resigned to compete in the 2000 presidential campaign and left in his place Rosario Robles, who served out the remainder of his term as the first woman to govern Mexico City.

The Head of Government elected for the 20002006 term was Andrés Manuel López Obrador, elected with 39% of the popular vote in the same election that saw Vicente Fox of the PAN win the presidency. López Obrador was temporarily removed from office by the federal Congress on 7 April 2005 and was replaced, on an interim basis for a period of slightly over two weeks, by his secretary of government, Alejandro Encinas. See desafuero of AMLO.

All the Heads of Government to date have come from the ranks of the left-of-centre Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) (or from PRD-led coalitions of parties); all the Heads of the Federal District Department were members of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

Contents

Advanced Search
Included Web Search Engines


Safe Search

close

Top Matching Results

Occasionally Search.com will highlight specialized results that are based on the context of your query. Examples of specialized results include specific links to news, images, or video.

Top Matching Results may highlight information from other Search.com pages, content from the CNET Network of sites, or third party content. The listings are based purely on relevance. Search.com does not receive payment for listings in this section but our partners that provide this data may get paid for listing these products.

Sponsored Links

This section contains paid listings which have been purchased by companies that want to have their sites appear for specific search terms and related content. These listings are administered, sorted and maintained by a third party and are not endorsed by Search.com.

Search Results

Search.com sends your search query to several search engines at one time and integrates the results into one list which has been sorted by relevance using Search.com's proprietary algorithm. You can customize the list of search engines included in your metasearch from the preferences.

The search engines that are used in your metasearch may allow companies to pay to have their Web sites included within the results. To view the Paid Inclusion policy for a specific search engine, please visit their Web site. Search.com does not accept payment or share revenue with any search engine partner for listings in this section.