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National Action Party (Mexico)

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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. Since 2007, the party is led by Germán Martínez Cázares. Since 2000, the President of Mexico has been a member of this party; both houses have PAN pluralities, however, the party does not have a majority in either house of Congress. In the 2006 legislative elections the party won 206 out of 500 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 52 out of 128 Senators.

History

20th century

Mexican Roman Catholics, together with other conservatives (mainly Manuel Gómez Morín), founded the PAN on September 17, 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.

In 1946, PAN members Miguel Ramírez Munguía (Tacámbaro, Michoacán), Juan Gutiérrez Lascurain (Federal District), Antonio L. Rodríguez (Nuevo León) and Aquiles Elorduy García (Aguascalientes) become the first four federal deputies from the opposition in post-Revolutionary Mexico. The following year Manuel Torres Serranía, from Quiroga, Michoacán, becomes the party's first municipal president and Dr. Alfonso Hernández Sánchez (from Zamora, Michoacán) its first state deputy,

In 1962 Rosario Alcalá (Aguascalientes) became the first female candidate for state governor and two years later Florentina Villalobos Chaparro (Parral, Chihuahua), became the first female federal deputy. In 1967 Norma Villarreal de Zambrano (San Pedro Garza García, Nuevo León) became the first female municipal president. In 1988 the newly created Assembly of Representatives of the Federal District had, for the first time, members of the PAN. In 1989 Ernesto Ruffo Appel (Baja California) became the first opposition governor. Two years later, his future successor in the Baja California government, Héctor Terán Terán, became the first federal senator from the PAN. From 1992 to 2000 PAN candidates won the elections for governorships in Guanajuato, Chihuahua, Jalisco, Querétaro, Nuevo León, Aguascalientes and Morelos.

21st century

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 senate elections of the same date, the Alliance won 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 most 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.

In 2003, the PAN lost the governorship of Nuevo León to the PRI and, the following year, failed to win back the state of Chihuahua from the PRI. Coupled with a bitterly fought election in Colima that was cancelled and later re-run, these developments were interpreted by some political analysts to be a significant rejection of the PAN in advance of the 2006 presidential election. 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 bailiwick; 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 and Nayarit 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's candidate, after beating his opponents Santiago Creel (Secretary of the Interior during Fox's term) and Alberto Cárdenas (former governor of Jalisco) 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.

In 2007, the PAN lost the governorship and the majority in the state congress of Yucatán to the PRI as well as the municipal presidency of Aguascalientes, but kept both the governorship and the majority in the state congress of Baja California. The PRI also obtained more municipal presidents and local congresspeople in Chihuahua, Durango, Zacatecas, Aguascalientes, Chiapas and Oaxaca. The PRD obtained more posts than the PAN in Zacatecas, Chiapas and Oaxaca.

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 christian 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, smaller government, and liberal reforms as well as opposition same-sex unions and abortion. 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. 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% Christian; 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).

Oppostion to abortion

In 1999 in Baja California, Paulina Ramírez Jacinto of age 14 was raped and became pregnant. The girl and her mother then obtained a permit from the state's Attorney General to have the abortion she was entitled to by law. State workers then deceived the girl and attempted to dissuade her from terminating her pregnancy and the state clinic denied her right to an abortion, Ramírez and her mother then complained at the state Human Rights Commission and then at the Inter-American Human Rights Commission which determined that Ramírez's human rights had been violated. The National Human Rights Commission then produced a recommendation for compensation for Ramírez. Through an Agreement with the IACHR, the state government promised to compensate Ramírez.

Carlos Abascal, secretary of the interior in the latter part of the Fox administration, called emergency contraception technology a "weapon of mass destruction" in July 2005.

The PAN produced a television spot against abortion, one that features Chespirito (who was also featured on a TV spot promoting Vicente Fox in the 2000 presidential elections) and a second one that accuses the PRI and PRD of wanting to kill the unborn. After the abortion bill was approved at the local legislature, the PAN requested the Human Rights Commission of the Federal District (CHDDF) to enact actions on the unconstitutionality of the measure, the CHDDF rejected the request as it found no basis of unconstitutionality . After unsuccessfully appealing to unconstitutionality, the PAN declared that it may request the remotion of Emilio Álvarez Icaza, the president of the Human Rights Commission of the Federal District, for his lack of "moral quality". The PAN, with the members of the Association of Catholic Lawyers, gathered signatures and turned them in to the Federal District Electoral Institute (IEDF) to void the abortion bill and force a referendum which was also rejected by the IEDF. In May 2007, the PAN started a campaign to encourage rejections to perform abortion amongst doctors in the Federal District based on conscience.

Oppostion to civil unions

The PAN has unsuccessfully opposed measures to establish civil unions in Mexico City and Coahuila.

On November 9 2006 the government of the Federal District approved the first law establishing civil unions in Mexico. The members of the PAN, and a member of New Alliance were the only legislators that voted against it.

The same year, the local legislature of Coahuila approved the law of civil unions to which the PAN also opposed. The PAN also lodged an unconstitutionality plea before the Supreme Court of Justice of the State of Coahuila, alleging that the constitution has vowed to protect the institution of the family.

Guillermo Bustamente Manilla, member of the PAN and president of the National Parents Union (UNPF) is also the father of Guillermo Bustamante Artasánchez, law director of the Secretary of the Interior, Carlos Abascal, during Fox's presidency and currently working in the Calderón administration opposes abortion and same-sex civil unions, and has called the later as "anti-natural". He has publicly asked voters not to cast votes for "abortionist" parties and those who are in favor of homosexual relationships.

Party Presidents

1.- Resigned to run for president

Presidential Candidates

Election Year Result Nominee
1952 lost Efraín González Luna
1958 lost Luis H. Álvarez
1964 lost José Luis González Torres
1970 lost Efraín González Morfín
1976 No Result No Candidate
1982 lost Pablo Emilio Madero
1988 lost Manuel J. Clouthier
1994 lost Diego Fernández de Cevallos
2000 won Vicente Fox Quesada
2006 won Felipe Calderón Hinojosa

References

External links



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