The PAN's Vital Man

Salvador García argues that the new key man in the PAN is longtime party heavyweight and former presidential candidate Diego Fernández de Cevallos:

Between Diego and the principal figures that today dominate the PRI --from Carlos Salinas to Manlio Fabio Beltrones, along with Beatriz Paredes and the governors-- there is a level of understanding and historic confidence. The PRI-PAN alliances in Salinas' sexenio, when Diego was chief of the PAN caucus in San Lázaro, remain until now the most lasting and influential pact in national politics, despite their electoral conflicts and cyclical disputes and everything else.

"The only panista that we trust to negotiate with, because he gives his word, is Diego," one of the PRI chiefs who remains in power once said. And that's why that Calderón has had to rely on Fernández de Cevallos and his group, despite the fact that at the beginning of the sexenio, Calderón requested that his advisors avoid any contact with the ex-presidential candidate because he felt that his images took points way from the new government.

With the arrival of Fernando Gómez Mont to the Interior it was clear that that distance between Calderón and Diego had ended. But with the much-questioned arrival of Arturo Chávez Chávez to the PGR there is no doubt that the politician with the beard and the cigar is back and his relevance isn't limited to the cabinet, rather he is the symbol and the point of liaison in the new alliance between the PRI of Salinas and the government.

Fernández de Cevallos' influence also helps explain why the initial burst of senatorial opposition to Chávez Chávez petered out.