 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 Gómez 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 between the end of the revolution and the election of 2000 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 (Ernesto Ruffo Appel) in 1989 in Baja California.The PAN occupies the right of Mexico's political spectrum, advocating free enterprise and corporative rule, privatization, reduced taxes, smaller government, and reform and even supression 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, the truth is otherwise; 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 at times ending his speeches with a "God bless you", enraging several sectors of Mexican society for mixing politics and religion.
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.
In the 2003 mid-term elections, the party won 23.1% of the popular vote and 153 out of 500 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. 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 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 candidate for the office of president, beating his opponents, Santiago Creel and Alberto Cárdenas, 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.
 The official website of National Action Party PAN (Spanish)
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