Centro Democrático y Social
The Centro Democrático y Social (CDS) (Democratic and Social Center) is a Spanish party with a liberal orientation.
The CDS was founded on June 29, 1982 by Adolfo Suárez González , Spanish Prime Minister from June 1976 to January 1981, as a spin-off from the then ruling party Unión de Centro Democrático .
In October 1982 the CDS won 600,000 votes and 2 members in the elections to the Spanish Congress of Representatives . In 1986 there were 1,800,000 votes and 19 seats, making the CDS the third strongest political force in the country. In the local elections, the elections in the autonomous communities and the European elections in 1987 it made it into 13 community parliaments and recorded around 6,000 local council members, 684 mayors, a good 200 seats in provinces and autonomous communities and 7 MEPs .
In January 1988 the CDS joined the Liberal International . After heavy losses in the local elections in 1991, Adolfo Suárez González resigned from the office of party president. Many personalities and members as well as almost the entire electorate then migrated to the Partido Popular (PP).
In the parliamentary elections in 1993, the CDS lost all Congress seats. Since then, it has been without mandates at national or regional level. At the municipal level, he has 54 city council members.
The party name and party orientation changed briefly between 1995 and 2002, but returned at the 10th party congress in October 2002.
In the parliamentary election on March 14, 2004 , the CDS received 34,101 votes. In 2006, the eleventh party congress of the CDS decided by a large majority to dissolve the party and to join the Partido Popular, which was then carried out.
At the dissolution party conference, however, several members also spoke out against joining the PP. As a result, several successor parties were founded after the CDS was dissolved. The largest of these is the Centro Democrático Liberal , which also became a member of the European ELDR party . The Centro Democrático Español was also created .
In addition, some members of the CDS, who had spoken out against joining the PP, held an extraordinary “twelfth” party congress in 2007, which followed the statutes of the (actually dissolved) party and elected Fabian Villalabeitia Copena as the new party president. This party, which sees itself as a continuation of the CDS, also ran for the Spanish parliamentary elections in 2008 , but due to organizational difficulties only in Madrid and Almería , where it achieved a total of 1327 votes.
