PAN's Desolate "Mass" Membership Drive
mexicosolidarity.com
It began in October with an arena event where Maximiliano Cortázar fell into a pool. Three months and only 3,500 new members later, the ultra-right party is still floundering in the deep end.

This article by Álvaro Delgado Gómez originally appeared in the January 26, 2026 edition of Sin Embargo.

Mexico City. The National Action Party’s ( PAN ) membership drive, announced in October as part of its relaunch and aimed at attracting young people with raffles for iPhone 17 phones, has been a failure: In three months it has added only 3,500 new members, an increase of just 1 percent of its membership rolls.

Jorge Romero Herrera, President of the PAN, announced the recruitment campaign on October 18 and consolidated it in December, but even the main figures of the right have scorned this process: Vicente Fox, the first President of Mexico not from the PRI, did not reaffiliate and neither did Felipe Calderón, who formally resigned in 2018.

Even Xóchitl Gálvez snubbed the party that made her a presidential candidate in 2024, and federal deputy Margarita Zavala Gómez del Campo, Calderón’s wife, has not reaffirmed her support for the PAN either, even though she is part of its parliamentary group.

Those who did rejoin the PAN are Germán Martínez Cázares, who resigned in 2018 to become a senator for Morena and director general of the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) at the invitation of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and Javier Lozano Alarcón, who in that same presidential election returned to the PRI to support José Antonio Meade.

Maximiliano Cortázar Lara goes for a dip.

Both are friends of Calderón: Martínez Cázares was Secretary of Public Administration, while Lozano was Secretary of Labor, and now they join others from the same group in the PAN, such as Roberto Gil Zuarth and Maximiliano Cortázar Lara.

It was precisely after Martínez left as president of the PAN, due to the defeat of 2009, that César Nava —his successor also imposed by Calderón— began a campaign to recruit members that, according to him, added 371,377 new members in just two weeks to reach a total of 1,414,435.

Although the PAN’s membership list did indeed grow after Fox’s victory in 2000 and Calderón’s fraud in 2006, even including figures from the oligarchy such as María Asunción Aramburuzavala and Lorenzo Servitje Sendra, along with their respective families, it was drastically reduced from Gustavo Madero’s presidency onwards and became an instrument of control with the “register keepers” who still control the list of members.

Such was the factional logic of the internal groups that the PAN almost lost its registration in 2023, for having only 277,000 members, a little over 20,000 more than the 256,000 required by law.

On October 18, Jorge Romero Herrera, national leader of the PAN party, unveiled the new logo for his political organization. Photo: Facebook National Action Party.

That’s why, on October 18 of last year, after its resounding defeat in the 2024 election, the PAN announced an open-door policy and launched a membership drive. At that time, the number of members was 318,799, according to the National Registry of Members (RNM).

A month and a half after the relaunch of the PAN and the reaffiliation campaign, on December 2, the total was 320,187. Only 1,388 new members had joined, an average of 30 per day.

And two months after the start of the campaign, on Thursday, December 18, the total was 320,716, meaning that only 1,917 Mexicans had joined, an average of 32 per day.

That’s why, the day after Christmas, on December 26, Romero Herrera relaunched the re-affiliation campaign with a message on social media: “Dare to face the future, dare to take action.”

“We’re going to raffle off an iPhone 17 Pro every month for all young people, and it’s totally legal. That’s how our founders did it, they held raffles: for everything, refrigerators, TVs.”

But exactly three months after the start of the process, on January 18, 2026, only 3,545 people joined the PAN, an average of 38 per day. At that time, the party had a total of 322,344 members. That is, a mere 1.1% increase from its October membership.

To attract new members to the PAN, Jorge Romero Herrera enabled an application with which those interested can affiliate, but he also offered to raffle an iPhone 17 Pro smartphone every month to motivate the participation of young people.

“We’re going to raffle off an iPhone 17 Pro every month for all young people, and it’s totally legal, in case they want to join the app. That’s how our founders did it, they held raffles: for everything, refrigerators, TVs,” Romero argued, but in reality the raffles that the PAN held were to finance itself when it didn’t receive public money before the government of Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

There is no evidence in the official channels of the PAN about the raffle of iPhone smartphones for those who join their party, as offered by Romero Herrera, but what is a fact is that affiliations have only grown 1% in three months.

The PAN’s process of registering new members has been carried out in parallel with the similar campaign also being conducted by Morena, the party in federal government, which reported that it has already surpassed 11 million Mexicans.

Álvaro Delgado Gómez is a journalist who began his career as a reporter in 1986, and has worked in the newsrooms ofEl Financiero*,El Nacional, andEl Universal, as well as head of Political Information at the weeklyProceso. He is the author of many books, includingEl Yunque: The Far Right in Power;El Ejército de Dios; andEl engaño: Prédica y práctica del PAN.El amasiato: El acuerdo secreto Peña-Calderón y otras traiciones PANistasis his most recent book.*

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