Liberal Party (Mexico)

The Liberal Party (Spanish: Partido Liberal, PL), was a political coalition that emerged in Mexico after independence. Strongly influenced by French Revolutionary thought, and the republican institutions of the United States, it championed the principles of 19th century liberalism, and promoted republicanism, federalism, and anti-clericalism. They were opposed by the Conservatives.

The federalist Constitution of 1824 represented a triumph for liberal thought, and during the era of the First Mexican Republic, the party's chief ideologists were Lorenzo de Zavala and José María Luis Mora. When President Valentin Gomez Farias sought to pursue an anti-clerical campaign in 1833, among other liberal reforms, his government was overthrown, and the triumphant conservatives replaced the constitution with the Siete Leyes inaugurating a decade of the Centralist Republic of Mexico.

By the time the federalist constitution was restored during the Mexican American War, a new generation of liberals had grown to public prominence. After a constitutional convention was inaugurated in 1856, men such as Melchor Ocampo, Benito Juarez, Ignacio Ramirez, and Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, pursued unprecedented liberal reforms, including a continuation of the anti-clerical measures which were first attempted in 1833. These measures would be known as La Reforma and ultimately be codified in the Constitution of 1857. The War of Reform with conservatives ensued and the conflict blended into the Second French Intervention in Mexico and the establishment of the Second Mexican Empire, but it ended with a decisive liberal triumph in 1867.

Porfirio Diaz, who became president in this era, had been a noted partisan of the liberals during the era of La Reforma, and even as he became in practice a dictator for life, his administration, and his intellectual supporters the Cientificos, continued to view themselves as the progressive heirs of La Reforma. The Constitution of 1857 would remain in effect until the Mexican Revolution.