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).
Mexican Roman Catholics, together with other conservatives (mainly
Manuel Gomez 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
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 since the end of the Mexican Revolution 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 in 1989 in
Baja California.
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. Three years later at the last
legislative elections, the party won 23.1% of the popular vote and 153 out of 500 seats in the
Chamber of Deputies.
The PAN occupies the right of Mexico's political spectrum, advocating free enterprise, reduced taxes, smaller government, and reform of the welfare state. Its philosophy has similarities with the
Republican Party of the
United States, the
Conservative Party of Canada or
Europe's
Christian Democratic parties, and 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 has continued to make very 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 always 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, Jalisco), 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
abortion, to which she was legally entitled.[
1]
Carlos Abascal, secretary of the interior in the
Vicente 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.
[[Image:State governments by party.PNG|thumb|left|State governments by party (as of 2005-2006)]]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 is considered one of the most important elections in the country because of the number of voters involved, which is higher than the elections for chief of government of
Mexico City (See:
2003 Mexican elections,
2004 Mexican elections and
2005 Mexican elections for results.)
For the presidential election in 2006,
Felipe Calderón, the former president of PAN, was selected as the PAN candidate for the office of President. He beat his opponents,
Santiago Creel and
Alberto Cárdenas, in every voting round in the party primaries.
On
July 2,
2006, The PAN candidate for the Mexican presidency,
Felipe Calderón, was voted the next president of Mexico. Finishing less than a percent behind was
Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
*
Official party website*
List of parties members of the Christian Democrat Organization of America *
Artists try to decipher Mexico's new political canvas *
The New Face of Mexico: Vicente Fox's Mexican Revolution
