PAN Suffers Heavy Losses in General Elections Latin American Herald Tribune
go to original July 3, 2012

Josefina Vazquez Mota, from the right-wing PAN, accepted her defeat on Sunday. (Johan Ordonez/AFP/Getty Images)

MEXICO CITY – Mexico’s governing National Action Party, or PAN, suffered “a huge defeat” in the general elections and will now have to “regroup and pick itself up,” party chairman Gustavo Madero said Monday.

Mexico is going through “a transition that is still at risk,” Madero told MVS radio.

The PAN chairman said he did not plan to resign, but he added that the party was undergoing “self-criticism and was humbled” by the election results.

PAN presidential candidate Josefina Vazquez Mota, the only woman in the race, acknowledged Sunday night that the voting results looked unfavorable.

Vazquez Mota came in third, getting 25.37 percent of the vote, with more than 90 percent of the ballots counted.

The PAN will now be the No. 3 party in the 500-seat lower house of Congress, going from 142 seats to 118 seats, and the No. 2 party in the 128-seat Senate, with the number of seats under its control dropping from 50 to 41.

Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, candidate Enrique Peña Nieto won the presidency, taking nearly 38 percent of the vote, while Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, candidate of the leftist Progressive Movement coalition, won about 32 percent of the vote.

The conservative PAN “continues to have the best of reasons to exist and continue building a democracy in Mexico,” Madero said.

“We do not know how this Institutional Revolutionary Party that has many faces is going to govern. It’s a medusa, it is a network of interests,” the PAN chairman said.

The PAN must move on and work to “build the citizenry, institutions,” Madero said.

Mexicans should not be “indifferent to the fact that today there are 10 states in the republic that have been governed without interruption by the PRI for 85 years,” the PAN chairman said.

The election results should “make us regroup to continue the fight” to democratize Mexico, Madero said.

“We have an agenda of economic, social and political reforms that is still pending, and that is where the PAN should regroup and pick itself up,” Madero said.

The PAN’s goal is to create “a democratic Mexico, one of liberty, of respect for human rights,” the PAN chairman said.

The PAN must work for “a market economy with social responsibility,” advocating “social inclusion” whether governing or in the opposition, Madero said.

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