National Action Party (PAN)

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National Action Party (PAN)

The National Action Party, or PAN (Partido de Acción Nacional), is one of the three major political parties in Mexico. Until 2000, PAN was Mexico's most influential opposition party, founded in 1939 by disgruntled former supporters of the government to oppose the policies of president Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940) and to provide a viable alternative to the National Revolutionary Party (PNR). The principal founders of the party were Manuel Gómez Morín, a leading intellectual figure in the 1920s, and Efraín González Luna, a prominent lawyer and Catholic lay leader from Guadalajara. As the party's leader until 1949, Gómez Morín attracted a distinguished group of former government officials and intellectuals, many of them activist Catholics, thus stamping the party with a pro-Catholic orientation. With the support of its rank and file, made up largely of middle-class professionals, businessmen, and Catholic student activists, the party succeeded in sending a small contingent of candidates to the Chamber of Deputies by the 1940s. During the 1950s, after Gómez Morín left the party leadership, his successors converted the PAN into a Christian democratic organization.

Although the party continued to expand its influence in the 1960s, it was characterized by numerous rifts within the party leadership over its ideological direction. Those differences often focused on whether the party should become a secular party opposed to state capitalism and the various political abuses of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) or whether it should function as a Christian democratic party. In the 1970s a faction controlling the party, believing that the party served only to legitimize the PRI, decided to boycott the 1976 presidential elections by refusing to nominate its own candidate. PAN's support declined precipitously. Reversing that strategy in 1982, it regained its previous strength and reassumed its role as the major opposition party, winning approximately 15 percent of the votes cast. In the 1988 presidential elections, under its charismatic presidential candidate Manuel Clouthier, it did extremely well in major cities, but for the first time in its electoral history, it took a back seat to another opposition party, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas's electoral alliance.

In the 1990s PAN candidates began winning gubernatorial races, strengthening a new kind of political leadership, generally businessmen turned politicians. Using its electoral victories at the local level, these politicians vied for leadership of the party and competed for the party's presidential nominations. The most notable of these noncareer politicians was Vicente Fox (2000–2006), who captured the PAN nomination for president in 2000. Fox created a citizen organization, the Amigos de Fox, which dramatically increased support for the PAN, overcoming its small partisan base and enabling the party to win a dramatic presidential election in 2000. Fox, however, was unable to use a coattails effect to significantly increase support for PAN legislative candidates. PAN obtains most of its support for national candidates among younger, urban, well-educated, and middle-class voters, especially in the north and west central areas. Leadership of the party shifted back to more traditional PAN politicians in 2006, and drawing from independent voters and defections from the PRI, its presidential candidate, Felipe Calderón, narrowly won the presidency with 36 percent of the vote, and PAN obtained 42 percent of the congressional seats.