7 - Nationalism and the Right: The PAN

Summary

The discourse of members and supporters of the main conservative opposition party in Mexico, the PAN, in party documents, reported comments, and in the publications La Nación and Palabra, reveals that the right also searched for a new legitimizing formula during the Salinas period. In particular, individualizing trends in Mexican political culture associated with a new civil society contributed to the modification of traditional conceptions of nationality in much PAN discourse. PAN ideology had traditionally been constructed upon a non-materialist source of legitimacy delimiting the public and private realms with moral principles and generating a political vision opposed to both centralizing statism and possessive individualism. During the Salinas period, a doctrinal debate took place in which ‘neopanismo’ – the new vision of an expanding, national PAN dominated by businessmen and reflecting liberal democratic concerns – challenged a traditional notion of nationality and advanced a more materialist conception of legitimacy deriving from the liberal preoccupation with individual enterprise and social stability. Neopanismo can be seen as the concrete expression of the individualizing political culture emphasizing freedom, universal human rights and social pluralism that has accompanied democratic change in Mexico.

As the PAN grew into a national opposition whose emphasis upon liberal democratic political and economic ideas deriving from this more strident individualism grew in relation to its traditional conservative principles, party ideologues found themselves confronting similar issues to the PRI, and to a lesser extent the PRD, about how to reconcile the individual and the social.