The National Action Party (, PAN) is a conservative political party in Mexico founded in 1939. The party is one of the main political parties in Mexico, and since the 1980s has had success winning local, state, and national elections.
In the historic 2000 Mexican general election, PAN candidate Vicente Fox was elected president, the first time in 71 years that the Mexican presidency was not held by the traditional ruling party, the PRI. Six years later, PAN candidate Felipe Calderón succeeded Fox following victory in the 2006 presidential election. In 2000–2012, PAN was the strongest party in both houses of the Congress of the Union (the federal legislature) but lacked a majority in either house. In the 2006 legislative elections, the party won 207 out of 500 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 52 out of 128 Senators. In the 2012 legislative elections, PAN won 38 seats in the Senate and 114 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, but the party did not win the presidential election in 2012 or 2018. The members of this party are colloquially called Panistas.
Notoriously, the two Presidents of the Republic elected as PAN candidates (Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón) have both left the party. Fox supported Institutional Revolutionary Party presidential candidates in 2012 and 2018, while Calderón founded his own party named "México Libre".
History
20th century
Founding
The National Action Party was founded in 1939 by Manuel Gómez Morín, who had held a number of important government posts in the 1920s and 1930s. He saw the need for the creation of a permanent political party rather than an ephemeral organization to oppose the expansion of power by the post-revolutionary Mexican state. When Gómez Morín was rector of UNAM between 1933 and 1935, the government attempted to impose socialist education. In defending academic freedom, Gómez Morín forged connections with individuals and groups that later came together in the foundation of the PAN in September 1939. The Jesuit student organization, Unión Nacional de Estudiantes Católicos (UNEC), provided a well-organized network of adherents who successfully fought the imposition of a particular ideological view by the state. Gómez Morín was not himself a militant Catholic, but he was a devout believer who rejected liberalism and individualism. In 1939, Gómez Morín and a significant number of UNEC's leadership came together to found the PAN. The PAN's first executive committee and committees on political action and doctrine also had former Catholic student activists, including Luis Calderón Vega, the father of Felipe Calderón, who became President of Mexico in 2006. The PAN's "Doctrine of National Action" was strongly influenced by Catholic social doctrine articulated in Rerum novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo anno (1931) and rejected Marxist models of class warfare. The PAN's newspaper, La Nación was founded by another former UNEC member, Carlos Séptien García.
Efraín González Luna, a former member of the Mexican Catholic Student Union (Unión Nacional de Estudiantes Católicos) (UNEC), a long-time militant Catholic and practicing lawyer from Guadalajara, helped broker the party's informal alliance with the Catholic Church. However, the relationship between the PAN and the Catholic Church was not without tension. The party's founder Gómez Morín was leery of clerical oversight of the party, although its members were mainly urban Catholic professionals and businessmen. For its part, the Church hierarchy did not want to identify itself with a particular political party, since the Constitution of 1917 forbade it. In the 1950s, the PAN, which had been seen to be Catholic in its makeup, became more ideologically secular.
Electoral results
The PAN initially was a party of "civic example", an independent loyal opposition that generally did not win elections at any level. However, in the 1980s it began a transformation to a political power, beginning at the local and state levels in the North of Mexico. A split in the PAN occurred in 1977, with the pro-Catholic faction and the more secular wing splitting. The PAN had updated its positions following the Second Vatican Council, toward a greater affinity for the poor; however, more traditional Catholics were critical of that stance and nonreligious groups were also in opposition, since they wanted the party to be less explicitly Catholic and draw in more urban professionals and business groups, who would vote for a nonreligious opposition party. The conflict came to a head, and in 1977 the progressive Catholic wing left the party.
