People Profile - José César Nava Vázquez, Mexico
Who is he? César Nava is the new president of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN).
Why watch him? The PAN, which has been in the ascendant for the past 20 years (and won the presidency in 2000 and 2006), suffered a major drubbing in the mid-term elections on 5 July 2009 and looks on course to lose the presidential elections in 2012 unless Nava can pull it around.
Date of Birth: 16 July 1974.
Birthplace: Morelia, Michoacán.
Education: Law graduate from Mexico's Universidad Panamericana; Master's in Law from Harvard.
Public life: Taught law at the Universidad Panamericana then became private secretary to President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, from mid-2006 until November 2008.
Time Line:
1988: Joins PAN.
1995: Elected head of the PAN's youth wing. Calderón was first secretary general.
1998 to 2000: Legal director for the PAN's national executive committee when Calderón was party president.
2000: Elected a federal deputy.
2001: Quit congress to advise the state oil company Pemex on legal issues
2002 to 2004: Head of the energy ministry's legal affairs department when Calderón was energy minister.
2005: Calderón's top spokesman during the presidential election campaign.
2006: Appointed private secretary to Calderón.
2008: Resigned as Calderón's private secretary to run for Congress.
2009: Elected to congress again, for a seat in Mexico City.
2009: Elected president of the PAN
Strengths: Nava is very close to Calderón. They first met when Nava was 14 but became friends during the 1994 presidential campaign of Diego Fernández de Cevallos, a maverick panista. Fernández, bizarrely, stopped campaigning when he looked on the verge of winning, allowing the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) candidate, Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León, to win. Nava was President Calderón's candidate for the party presidency.
Weaknesses: Nava has done little else in his life besides serve Calderón and the PAN. This immaturity worries some of the PAN's old guard who fear that their well-meant and constructive criticism of Calderón will be dismissed as dissidence. Calderón's dominance of the party, the old guard fear, will lead to another electoral disaster in 2012. The old guard say that Nava is not very different from Calderón's first choice as party president, Germán Martínez Cázares. Martínez took the blame for the electoral disaster of 5 July this year when the PAN's representation in congress was cut from 207 to 143 seats.
Prospects: Uncertain. Nava avoided the embarrassment of being defeated in the election for the party presidency in which he was the only candidate but he failed to be elected unanimously. He did win easily though: he won 290 votes, far more than the 250 he needed, but 39 members of the 349 members of the PAN's national executive who turned up to vote abstained from supporting him. Nava's big problem is that he is a stopgap. He is serving out only what remains of his predecessor's term and therefore faces re-election at the end of 2010.