National Action Party (Mexico): Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

The National Action Party (Spanish: Partido Acción Nacional), known by the acronym PAN, is one of the main political parties in Mexico.

It spent the years from its foundation in 1939 in opposition, since all presidents since the end of the 1910-21 Mexican Revolution were from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) or its variously named predecessors. This changed on July 2, 2000, when Vicente Fox Quesada of the PAN won the presidential election.

The PAN occupies the center-right of Mexico's political spectrum, advocating free enterprise, reduced taxes and government interference, and reform of the welfare state: it is much like the United States Republican Party. Some hardline members of the PAN call for restrictions on abortion, homosexuality, and – in the most extreme cases – miniskirts and the public use of profanity.

The party is led by Luis Felipe Bravo Mena (2003).

On July 4, 2004, the PAN lost several important state elections, including governorship elections in the states of Zacatecas, Chihuahua, and Durango, to candidates from the PRI and PRD. Coupled with defeats in other gubernatorial elections in 2003, this development was considered by some political analysts to be a significant repudiation 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 cities of Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua. (See: 2004 Mexican elections for results.)