During the Salinas era, the left also searched for a new legitimizing formula, and the emergence of a democratic left posing a significant challenge to the PRI was accompanied by a restatement of the struggle against inequality of political liberalism and the nation-building discourse underlying revolutionary nationalism. Yet discourses on the left, and in particular those of the main left-wing party in this period, the PRD, reveal how difficult this search was. The writing and comments of left-wing intellectuals in party documents and publications such as Coyuntura and Motivos, as well as in the mainstream press such as the magazines Proceso and Nexos, reveal how the PRD's own composition as a fragile coalition between revolutionary nationalism and socialism was responsible for a lack of ideological unity, hampering the development of a coherent formula of national citizenship. While left-wing intellectuals coincided with the analysis of salinismo to the extent that they identified a conflict between the individual and social realms, that is, between the modernity offered by individualism and the Mexican national idea, the PRD failed to establish its social-democratic credentials and remained wedded to a strong, interventionist state and a limited private realm in this period. Its vision was of a statist political economy and the preference of many perredistas was for an integral, corporate democracy founded upon a social pact that substituted that of revolutionary nationalism. The PRD's vision of a broad social pact mediated by a powerful state envisaged a return to notions of nationality based upon a limited individualism. This was inconsistent with the notion of citizenship inherent in the liberal democratic discourse of universal individual rights that it had assumed in its struggle against PRI authoritarianism. While there were indications of interactions and coincidences between the ideas being debated by the salinistas and by left-wing thinkers, the PRD nonetheless provides an example of a party that failed to reconstitute its vision of national citizenship in keeping with the change in political economy. While it attracted broad popular support as a democratic opposition at the start of the sexenio, this diminished in a climate of resurgent liberalism apparently offering greater social inclusion through new individual freedoms.

The Partido de la Revolución Democrática

The origins of the PRD lay in the internal tensions within the PRI caused by disagreements over economic reform in the late 1970s and early 1980s.