Colors Indigo Senate 0 / 128 | Chamber of Deputies 10 / 500 Color Indigo | |
 | ||
Headquarters Baja California Sur, Mexico Ideology Conservatism
Social conservatism
Third Position
Paleoconservatism Political position Centre-right to Right-wing Founder Hugo Eric Flores Cervantes Founded 30 October 2006, Baja California, Mexico Profiles | ||
Social Encounter Party (Spanish: Partido Encuentro Social, PES) is a Mexican political party established on the national level in 2014.
Contents
History
The Social Encounter Party was founded in 2006 by Dr. Hugo Eric Flores Cervantes, a pastor of a Neo-Pentecostal church that supported Felipe Calderón in the 2006 presidential election. It had previously been a "national political grouping", which does not receive public funding. The party made many of its early successes in the state of Baja California. In 2007, it supported the successful candidacy of José Guadalupe Osuna Millán, of the PAN, but in 2013, it allied with the PRI in Baja California instead, which led it to elect a state deputy to a district in Tecate and four council members in Tijuana.
In July 2014, it obtained federal registry. After doing so, eight of its nine political assemblies were nullified, as bribes were given to attendees. In the 2015 legislative elections, it obtained eight proportional representation seats in the Chamber of Deputies as a result of obtaining 3.3 percent of the vote.
The party is primarily composed of evangelical Christians, though it has declared itself as "not religious" in character.
Policy positions
The PES tends to include many strands of Christian humanist thinking and is generally socially conservative, though Flores has stated that it is a "liberal" party. The Baja California state party uses a stylized ichthus in its logo, which is not used by the national organization.
The party characterizes itself as the "party of the family". It opposes same-sex marriage and was responsible for reforms to the Baja California constitution in 2008 that establish marriage as "between one man and one woman". In 2015, the PES gubernatorial candidate in the state of San Luis Potosí compared homosexuality to drug trafficking and violence. Likewise, it opposes abortion and pornographic magazines.
Other proposals made by the PES include shifting the collection of value-added tax to the states instead of the federal government and consolidating it with income tax.