Dense Dresser: Delivering bread

Denise Dresser

Videos came out. There were events with lights, fiery speeches and triumphant selfies announcing the new image of the National Action Party. They spoke of renewal, of relaunching, of reconnecting with citizens. Redesigned logos, recycled promises and a call to “believe again” were presented. But precisely that—this relaunch so limited, so cosmetic—reveals that they don’t understand that they don’t understand.

Because the PAN is not an innocent victim of the authoritarian populism that dominates Mexico today. He is your absent father, your irresponsible midwife, your involuntary co-author. During twelve years of PAN governments—those of Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón—the country experienced an alternation in which the PAN did not break with the old regime. Too often he mimicked it.

As documented in the book El PAN: Twelve Years of Government, coordinated by Ana Covarrubias, the party dismantled the PRI monopoly, but did not redesign the corroded institutions. He opened the door of democracy, but let in the old vices with a new uniform.

Fox turned the Presidency into a talk show. Marta Sahagún in a reality show. Calderón believed he could gain legitimacy with bullets. Twelve years that could change everything and only the checkbook changed hands. Twelve years of wasted opportunities, of absent accountability, of complicity with the same businessmen, bosses, contractors and leaders they promised to confront.

Yes, there were administrative advances, some professional local governments, some modernization, achievements in culture. But there was also complacency. And when the punishment came, they ignored it.

Morena is, in large part, a reaction to the ethical and political failure of the PAN. Three consecutive elections—2012, 2018, 2024—and the electorate’s message still does not enter their heads.

The population does not want to return to the past. He does not want moral speeches, but social policies. He does not want a persigned right, but an opposition capable of speaking about inequality, poverty, rights, feminism, dignity.

But the PAN insists on going backwards. We saw it in the Pink Tide, defending the INE as if it were a sacred totem and not an institution that also erred. The INE “is not touched,” they said, when it should have been touched to correct its omissions: not deregistering the Green, not fining the PRI for Monex and Soriana, not reviewing how its own General Council began to be co-opted by the party leadership.

They defend institutions that they could not or did not want to reform. They argue that “we were better before,” without offering how to be better tomorrow. What they transmit is not renewal, but melancholy. A comfortable wallowing in helplessness.

And all this happens while the country changed. Since 2018 there has been an electoral realignment, as explained by academic Alejandro Moreno in El viraje electoral. Mexico turned left. He turned towards social concerns that the PAN never knew how to understand.

Because the PAN still breathes elitism, classism, misogyny, discrimination. He does not speak the language of the new generations. It does not offer a counternarrative to the resonant “neoliberal long night,” other than returning there.

Worse still: there are no solid leaders in its leadership. There is no imagination. The PAN, which in the 80s and 90s played a key role in the democratic transition—negotiating, mobilizing, building citizenship, taking it to the streets—became a shadow that only tweets.

From an opposition party, it became a chorus of lamentations. From political force, to hashtag. It lost the ability to be a receptacle of discontent, revealed at a granular level in surveys where Sheinbaum is approved, but the results of his government are disapproved.

A true relaunch would imply a real change of leadership. An open assembly to debate new statutes. A speech that offers hope, solutions, daring agendas. A name change. A refoundation. A bold gesture that said: we learned, we changed, we became different.

It is not enough to just cut the alliance with the PRI or cozy up to far-rightists.

But what we have seen is just a refinement of the logo. A video where good and evil fight like in a science fiction movie. An apocalyptic aesthetic, a simple narrative. A relaunch that seems more like a re-sink. And what National Action needs is not a new logo. It is a new spine.

denise.dresser@mexicofirme.com

Academic and political scientist