Democratic Action
The Acción Democrática (AD, " Democratic Action ") is a social-democratic oriented party in Venezuela. She was up in the 1990s, the country's largest party and placed eight times the president. Since then she has lost importance and is in opposition.
The founder of the party was Rómulo Betancourt.
The AD was founded in 1941 shortly after the Communist Party, but was from the 1940s, the first and only People's Party of Venezuela. Unlike previous parties which were rather elitist voting organizations, it had a mass base. During the democratic phase of the so-called trienios 1945-1948 the party dominated all elections. The presidential election in 1947 won their candidate Rómulo Gallegos with 74%. The party took a democratic and anti-imperialist nationalism and populism, comparable to the APRA in Peru and the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR ) in Bolivia. Like these, they tried to reach an agreement by workers, middle class, farmers and national- oriented entrepreneurs. So she sat on the one hand against the traditional landowning elite and the influence of foreign capital, on the other hand against communist class struggle.
During the dictatorship of Pérez Jiménez Marco 1948-1958 AD was banned as the strongest opposition party and many members fought in the underground against the dictator. After his overthrow in 1958 AD peak concluded with the two other pro-democracy parties, the progressive- liberal Unión Democrática Republicana ( URD ) and the Christian Democratic COPEI the Punto Fijo - Agreement. So they wanted Trienio avoid a concentration of power as in guaranteeing a stable democracy and economic development and keep the communists from power. While the influence of the URD declined rapidly, AD and COPEI have been the dominant parties in the country and carrier of a de facto two-party system for the following decades. The leader of the AD, Rómulo Betancourt, won the first presidential election after the end of the dictatorship. In the following thirty years, the candidate of the AD won five of seven presidential elections.
1960 split from the young left wing and founded the short-lived Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR; German " Left Revolutionary Movement "), which acted together soon with the Communists in the underground. At the elections in 1963 the party suffered a new divide: While the trailer Betancourt competed as AD Gobierno, as a candidate his inner-party opponents as AD oposición. The wing government won the election clearly, while the dissenters failed. The official AD candidate Raúl Leoni became the new president. Shortly before the presidential elections in 1967 seceded from the former AD President Prieto Figueroa and founded with the left wing of the Movimiento Electoral del Pueblo (MEP). 1968 AD reached the 26 % and the MEP 13% of the vote. It could be president Rafael Caldera from the Christian democratic COPEI. The AD 1966 observer, an associate in 1981 and soon after a full member of the Socialist International.
During the 1990s, the two established parties AD and COPEI lost their influence. 1989 won the AD with Carlos Andrés Pérez was the last time the presidential elections in Venezuela. Manuel Rosales, a former politician of the AD and founder of the center-left party Un Nuevo Tiempo ( UNT ), 2006 was a common candidate of the opposition parties, but was defeated President Hugo Chávez clearly. Since 2008, the AD part of the opposition alliance Mesa de la Unidad Democrática is (MUD ) against the governments of Chávez and Nicolás Maduro. In the current legislature ( since 2010) it is of 19 seats strongest opposition party in the National Assembly, but far behind the ruling Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela ( PSUV ). It supported the candidacies of Henrique Capriles Radonski in the presidential elections of 2012 and 2013.