On the next May 18th, PAN will have internal elections in order to appoint who will occupy its national leadership as well as the party\u2019s general secretariat for a brief period that would end once the 2015 federal elections have come to an end. The main candidates are the current leader, Gustavo Madero, who is accompanied by the former president of the board of the Chamber of Deputies, Ricardo Anaya, as well as the Senator on leave, Ernest Cordero, who has teamed up with the former Guanajuato Governor, Juan Manuel Oliva. That way, it is likely that we\u2019re witnessing the latest \u2013 and the least \u201cengaging\u201d \u2013 episode of the struggle between a group that is akin to former Mexican President Felipe Calder\u00f3n (whose speed of disintegration has been directly proportional to the decrease of its income source) and a sort of countercurrent that, even when Madero is currently identified as its leader and can be confused with an anti-Calder\u00f3n force, it only has political survival as its ultimate goal. The importance of Calder\u00f3n as a reference \u2013 whether it is positive or negative \u2013 has faded out, although it should be said that it is not due to the leadership abilities of Madero rather than his political opportunism. In the face of a likely reelection of the latter in the party\u2019s National Executive Committee (CEN) and given the conditions in which this will occur, what is next for PAN?
\nCompared to what happened in 2010, when Madero became the leader of the party, the 2014 PAN election has several differences. After the statutory reform of 2013, the right-wing party will choose its highest authorities via the vote of its members \u2013 several of which were recently purged a few months ago (with the subsequent loss of hundreds of thousands of affiliates) \u2013 and not through the body known as the National Council. This modification, although it may decentralize the process, it also changes the nature of the race in two ways: on one hand, it empowers local leaderships who are influenced by the national leadership (and the allocation of party resources); on the other hand, an open territorial race implies a great expenditure of resources and, thus, the availability of such resources greatly determines the result. Thanks to the Pact for Mexico, Madero has several resources at his disposition, courtesy from the government.
\nAnother difference is the lack of clear leaderships within factions of PAN. The attempt of building a faction that is opposed to Madero\u2019s reelection \u2013 whose success was not very promising to begin with \u2013 suffered a significant blow when Josefina V\u00e1zquez Mota decided not to run. The consolidation of those akin to Cordero seems more a desire than something feasible. Lastly, the participative enthusiasm of the party\u2019s social basis, something that is allegedly very important in PAN\u2019s attempt to reach out to the general population and put itself as a government option (an image greatly undermined by its twelve years in the federal administration), still is nowhere to be found.
\nIf continuity is imposed in PAN, the risks equal the opportunities. The former implies broadening an image of pragmatic collaborationism that is embodied by agreements such as the now-defunct Pact for Mexico. Sacrificing the differentiation of PAN from the federal government, although politically profitable (2015 could turn out to be a scenario of \u201csufficient results\u201d for the party, that is to say, winning some relevant municipalities and boroughs but most likely nothing that will put the PRI majority in Congress at risk or the latter\u2019s hegemony within local governorships), would continue to weaken the party as a real alternative to PRI. On the other hand, regarding the advantages of consolidating the group within PAN leadership, the possibility of reintegrating the party and showing one face to the outside world, certainly stands out. All of the aforementioned will be conditioned to the presence of a strategy that aims to restore and modernize PAN\u2019s values, as well as the establishment of a plan that gathers the general population\u2019s concerns about PRI\u2019s way of running the country now that it has returned to power.<\/p>\n
CIDAC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On the next May 18th, PAN will have internal elections in order to
\nappoint who will occupy its national leadership as well as the party\u2019s
\ngeneral secretariat for a brief period that would end once the 2015
\nfederal elections have come to an end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":4656,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[30],"class_list":["post-3519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-weekly-political-analysis","tag-political-analysis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3519"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3519\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4239,"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3519\/revisions\/4239"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cidacmx.org\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}