PAN chairman says his party will regain Mexico’s presidency

The chairman of the opposition National Action Party, or PAN, said during a rally that the party would regain the presidency because it was growing and “is ready” to set the course for Mexico’s future.

Ricardo Anaya told PAN members on Saturday that 2015 would be the year for the conservative party to “rectify the country’s direction.”

“After this election (the June 7 midterm election), we are going to regain the presidency of the republic,” Anaya said in an address to a special session of the PAN national council in Mexico City.

“Millions of Mexicans have placed their hopes in the PAN, the polls show that we are the only party that is growing,” Anaya said.

The governing Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, “has taken away Mexicans’ hope and that is why a change of direction is needed right away,” the PAN chairman said.

The PAN is the party that ended the PRI’s 71year hold on the presidency in 2000, when Vicente Fox won Mexico’s highest office.

Fox was succeeded in 2006 by fellow PAN member Felipe Calderon, who ended his term amid criticism of the war he declared on Mexico’s drug cartels and the tens of thousands of deaths that his security strategy produced.

After 12 years out of power, the PRI regained the presidency in 2012, when Enrique Peña Nieto won the nation’s highest office.

PAN candidate Josefina Vazquez Mota finished in third place in the 2012 presidential election.