National Action Party (Mexico)

The National Action Party (Spanish: Partido Acción Nacional), known by the acronym PAN, is a conservative and Christian Democratic party and one of the three main political parties in Mexico. The party is led by Manuel Espino Barrientos (2005).

History

Mexican Roman Catholics, together with other conservatives (mainly Manuel Gómez Morín), founded the PAN in 1939 after the cristero insurgency lost the Cristero War. They were looking for a peaceful way to bring about change in the country and to achieve political representation, after the years of chaos and violence that followed the Mexican Revolution. The turning point in the Cristero War was when the Roman Catholic Church reached an agreement with the National Revolutionary Party – the forerunner of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that dominated power for most of the 20th century – whereunder it turned a blind eye to the lack of democracy in the country and stopped supporting the Catholic rebels, threatening its members with excommunication if they disobeyed the government.

The PAN spent its first years since its foundation in 1939 in opposition, as all presidents between the end of the revolution and the election of 2000 were from the PRI or its variously named predecessors. Despite an absence during the 1976 elections due to internal rivalries, the party saw its support grow during the 1980s and 1990s, leading to the first non-PRI governor (Ernesto Ruffo Appel) in 1983 in Baja California.

Ideology

"National Action" politics

The PAN has been linked to a conservative stance in Mexican politics since its inception, but the party does not consider itself a fundamentally conservative party. The party ideology, at least in principle, is that of "National Action" which rejects a fundamental adherence to left- or right-wing politics or policies, instead requiring the adoption of such policies as correspond to the problems faced by the nation at any given moment. Thus both right and left wing policies may be considered equally carefully in formulation of national policy. (This is a similar theoretical basis as both Gaullism and Peronism, although the similarity is weakened in the later case by the distinctly authoritarian stance of Perón.)

This theory of National Action politics, rejecting a fundamental adherence to right or left, is held within a strongly Roman Catholic context, and falls under the umbrella of Christian Democracy.

The party theory was largely developed by early figures such as Gómez Morín and his associates.

However, some observers consider the PAN claim to National Action politics to be weakened by the apparent persistent predominance of conservatism in PAN policy in practice.

Conservative politics

The PAN currently occupies the right of Mexico's political spectrum, advocating free enterprise, privatization, reduced taxes, smaller government, and liberal reforms. Its philosophy has similarities with the Republican Party of the United States, or the Conservative Party of Canada, but mostly with Europe's Christian Democratic parties. Many of its members are also advocates of Roman Catholicism as a political inspiration. The PAN is a member of the Christian Democrat Organization of America (CDOA). The PAN officially claims to be a non-confessional party in a country that is 90% Catholic; however, while on the campaign trail in 2000, Vicente Fox appeared holding a banner emblazoned with the revered icon of the Virgin of Guadalupe – and was fined MXN $20,000 for mixing religion and politics. As president, he continued to make public appearances attending mass as well as proclaiming his faith (even kissing Pope John Paul II's ring upon his arrival in Mexico in 2002) and at times ending his speeches with a "God bless you", enraging several sectors of Mexican society for mixing politics and religion.

In some cases, PAN mayors and governors have banned public employees from wearing miniskirts (Guadalajara), clamped down on the use of profanity in public marketplaces (Santiago de Querétaro), and once, in Baja California, brought religious and political pressure to bear on a teenaged rape victim to dissuade her from the abortion to which she was legally entitled.^[1] Carlos Abascal, secretary of the interior in the latter part of the Fox administration, called birth control pills weapons of mass destruction in 2005. Such stances are not, however, shared by many of the PAN's middle-class rank and file members, who traditionally saw supporting the party as the best way of preventing the PRI from remaining in power, but have seen sectors of the party going far to the right.

Party Presidents

• Manuel Gómez Morín 1939-1949
• Juan Gutiérrez Lascuráin 1949-1956
• Alfonso Ituarte Servín 1956-1959
• José González Torres 1959-1962
• Adolfo Christlieb Ibarrola 1962-1965
• Ignacio Limón Maurer 1965-1968
• Manuel González Hinojosa 1969-1972
• José Ángel Conchelo Dávila 1972-1975
• Efraín González Morfín 1975¹
• Raúl González Schmall 1975 (interim)
• Manuel González Hinojosa 1975-1978
• Avel Vicencio Tovar 1978-1984
• Pablo Emilio Madero 1984-1987
• Luis H. Álvarez 1987-1993
• Carlos Castillo Peraza 1993-1996
• Felipe Calderón Hinojosa 1996-1999
• Luis Felipe Bravo Mena 1999-2005
• Manuel Espino Barrientos 2005-Incumbent

_{1.- Resigned to run for President of Mexico}

Presidential Candidates

• Efraín González Luna 1952
• Luis H. Álvarez 1958
• José Luis González Torres 1964
• Efraín González Morfín 1970
• NO CANDIDATE IN 1976
• Pablo Emilio Madero 1982
• Manuel J. Clouthier 1988
• Diego Fernández de Cevallos 1994
• Vicente Fox Quesada 2000
• Felipe Calderón Hinojosa 2006

Recent history

In the 2000 presidential elections, the candidate of the Alianza por el cambio ("Alliance for change"), formed by the PAN and the PVEM, Vicente Fox Quesada won 42.5% of the popular vote and was elected president of Mexico. In the senatorial elections of the same date, the Alliance as part of the 46 out of 128 seats in the Senate. The Alliance broke off the following year and the PVEM has since participated together with the PRI in several elections.

In the 2003 mid-term elections, the party won 30.74% of the popular vote and 153 out of 500 seats in the Chamber of Deputies.

On July 4, 2004, the PAN lost several state elections, including those to elect governors for the states of Zacatecas, Chihuahua, and Durango, to candidates from the PRI and PRD. Coupled with defeats in other gubernatorial elections in 2003 (particularly the northern industrial powerhouse of Nuevo León, and a bitterly fought election in Colima that was cancelled and later re-run), this development was interpreted by some political analysts to be a significant rejection of the PAN in advance of the 2006 presidential election. The defeat was considered especially severe in Chihuahua because that state was where PAN won its first electoral victories in 1983, when PAN mayoral candidates won in the border city of Ciudad Juárez and state capital Chihuahua. In contrast, 2004 did see the PAN win for the first time in Tlaxcala, defeating the PRD in a state that would not normally be considered PAN homeland; it also managed to hold on to Querétaro and Aguascalientes. However, in 2005 the PAN lost the elections for the state government of Estado de México (to the PRI) and Nayarit (most likely to the PRI). The former was considered one of the most important elections in the country because of the number of voters involved, which is higher than the elections for head of government of the Federal District (See: 2003 Mexican elections, 2004 Mexican elections and 2005 Mexican elections for results.)

For the presidential election in 2006, Felipe Calderón, a former party president, was selected as the PAN candidate for the office of president, beating his opponents, Santiago Creel and Alberto Cárdenas, in every voting round in the party primaries. On July 2, 2006, Felipe Calderón secured a plurality of the votes cast. Finishing less than one percent behind was Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who unsuccessfully challenged the results of the election. In addition to the presidency, the PAN won 206 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 52 in the Senate, securing it the largest single party blocs in both houses.

References

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