The PAN's Transformation

Sergio Aguayo has a really interesting comment about the descent of the PAN from the noble conscience of the nation while in the opposition to the PRI-lite of the past decade. After examining the role of Vicente Fox in establishing the governing style of the modern PAN, he continues:

With all the importance that individual biographies have, they are insufficient for understanding the transformation of the PAN. To go a little deeper, the first great game-changer was the demonstration in November of 1988, in which they conceded to Carlos Salinas de Gortari the possibility of legitimizing himself with results. Later would come the methods of Diego Fernández de Cevallos or the alliance of Fox and Felipe Calderón with Elba Esther Gordillo, a teacher who, to be sure, also presented herself as a social democrat in the decade of the 1990s.

These and many other personal stories constitute the collective evolution. There is empirical information that demonstrates it. Another finding from the latest book of Alejandro Moreno, The electoral decision (Porrúa, 2009), is that the panista victories at the ballot box caused notable increases in the activists and sympathizers of the PAN. Those who identify themselves as "panistas," he writes "are newly minted."

The figures confirm that, beginning with the 1990s, the PAN confronted the most intense siege of its history. The organization and its leaders lived the attack of the buffalos and the sycophants trained at massaging egos, offering to do "whatever you need sir/madam" and solving all the problems because a good servant of the "system" is PhD jack-of-all-trades. Moreno found in his surveys that a high percentage of those who became disillusioned with the PRI, when it lost strength, chose the PAN as their principal destination. It's paradoxical that the panistas, who so criticized the PRD for being an offshoot of the PRI, ended up being the chosen nest of the majority of priísta exiles.

One of the great dramas of the human condition is handling power or the anxieties of achieving it. To take it to a more relevant realm, a Mexicanized version of the Faustian myth would be the dilemma that the longtime and newly arrived panistas face: will they continue being a pirate copy of the worst of the PRI's habits and customs or will they in their heroic and prosaic past the inspiration to redefine their identity.

I think one thing that is often overlooked in such critiques is how inevitable disappointment is once an opposition party takes over. (For another modern example see Democrats, the.) In this case, the PAN could have made a clearer break with the PRI's governing style, but the PAN also had to operate in the world that the PRI created; they couldn't start from scratch. That doesn't invalidate what Aguayo says at all; updating the PAN's image is going to be a fundamental (and Herculean!) task of whoever winds up with the 2012 nomination, and whichever party wins, breaking Mexico's reliance on PRI-era "habits and customs" remains an important and incomplete process. But the PAN's evolution from noble outsider to corrupt player is an eternal part of politics, and the dilemma (to use Aguayo's word) facing the PAN today was to a certain degree unavoidable.