New America Media

MERIDA, Mexico – Mexico’s presidential elections are less than six weeks away, and for now it appears that opposition candidate Enrique Peña Nieto remains the clear favorite. His party’s reliance on traditional media, however, has ignited a firestorm within the country’s “Facebook Generation.”

Younger Mexicans expected this to be the first presidential election cycle in which social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn would transform the political landscape. Instead, they’ve found, Old Media is striking back.

Vázquez, a Social Media sensation, got millions of women Tweeting, and enlisted millions of youth as “Friends” on Facebook. But her campaign has run up against a PRI advertising blitzkrieg that has blanketed the country’s newspapers, billboards and airwaves.

Concepción May is a PRI member. For the past few months she has been hard at work organizing neighborhoods – handing out T-shirts, making sure voters have transportation to polling places and delivering campaign posters people can hang on doors and windows. “This is a campaign and the winner will be chosen by people who get away from their computers and go vote,” she says.

In an unprecedented display, the PRI has blanketed Mexico with posters, billboards and fliers displaying the party’s candidates. Television and radio advertisements are running non-stop, as are full-page ads in newspapers and magazines. It is the audacity of the PRI – which has spent an untold fortune on traditional advertising – that has enraged Mexico’s youth.

In a series of “strikes,” “protests” and “rallies,” the so-called Facebook generation has taken to the streets in the hundreds of thousands, directing their anger at the opposition and at traditional media – newspapers and television broadcasters – who, they say, have sold out to the relentless advertising of the PRI.

Political commentators and observers see this social media backlash against the PRI’s campaign as the beginning of a “student movement” that stands to upend the presidential race in the last month of the campaign.

Whether it will be enough to upend the PRI and their Old Media allies is another question.