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. They began to reformulate the parameters of the public and private realms in ways that sought Raúl Ramos Alcantará to mediate between individualizing discourses and their own vision of society, which resembled the PRI's ‘social liberalism’. There were also programmatic coincidences with salinismo – with the PRI adopting PAN economic ideas, and its proposals for land reform providing a model for Salinas's reform of Article 27, and PAN support for the government's negotiation of NAFTA and other measures, such as the reform of Article 82 – that had implications for the official formula of citizenship.

The Partido Acción Nacional

The PAN was founded in 1939 by Manuel Gómez Morín, a former economic policymaker, and Efraín González Luna, a lawyer and Catholic activist, as a conservative reaction to the statist and populist economic policies of President Lázaro Cárdenas.