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.

Conservative politics

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.^* 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.

Recent history

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.

External links

National Action Party (Mexico) | Political parties in Mexico | 1939 establishments

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Conservative politics

Recent history

External links