Unión Cívica Radical

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Unión Cívica Radical
logo
Alfredo Cornejo 2 (cropped) .jpg
Party leader Alfredo Cornejo
founding 1891
Place of foundation Buenos Aires
Headquarters Alsina 1786, Buenos Aires
Alignment left-liberal , social democratic
Colours) Red Black
Number of members 2,267,233 (2011)
International connections Socialist International , COPPPAL
Website ucr.org.ar

The Unión Cívica Radical ( UCR ; German  Radical Citizens Union ) is the oldest party still in existence in Argentina . It was founded in 1891 and was in power for a total of 27 years. The rest of the time the UCR spent in the opposition or was unable to actively participate in the political decision-making process during the (military) dictatorships.

history

Foundation and opposition

The UCR goes back to the Unión Cívica , which was created in 1889 and whose heads were Bartolomé Miter and Leandro Nicéforo Alem . The Unión Cívica tried in the so-called "Revolución del Parque" or "Revolución del [18] 90" by an armed uprising to remove President Miguel Juárez Celman from office. The uprising was put down, but the president resigned and his vice-president Carlos Pellegrini took over the presidency.

By an agreement between Roca and Miter, the Unión Cívica was split and the Unión Cívica Radical was created, which resolutely rejected the Roca-Miter agreement.

The UCR was instrumental in ensuring that free, secret, equal and universal suffrage was introduced in 1912 .

The Yrigoyen era

In 1916 she won the first free presidential election with her candidate Hipólito Yrigoyen . In 1922 he was replaced by his party colleague Marcelo Torcuato de Alvear . During this reign, a conservative group of the party split off with the Unión Cívica Radical Anti-Personalista , which opposed the perceived authoritarianism of Yrigoyen and, in 1928, put up its own presidential candidate, Leopoldo Melo, against the reunited Yrigoyen.

In the 1928 election, however, Yrigoyen clearly won and won the presidency again. As a result, tensions between UCR and UCR Antipersonalista intensified . Argentina was also hit by the Great Depression in 1929 at this time . Yrigoyen reacted to the increasing difficulties with increasing severity by intervening in some provinces and removing oppositional governors.

“Década Infame” and Concordancia

In 1930, Yrigoyen was ousted by a military coup led by José Félix Uriburu ; part of the UCR Antipersonalista was involved in this coup. As a result, democracy was severely weakened by numerous rigged elections, which is why this period is also known as década infame (infamous decade). The UCR Antipersonalista was involved in power in this system through the Concordancia coalition and provided several ministers during the reign of Agustín Pedro Justos .

The UCR itself, whose leadership Alvear had taken over, did not participate in regional elections again until 1935 and was able to achieve some success. In 1937 Alvear ran as a presidential candidate, but failed against Roberto María Ortiz of the UCR Antipersonalista, which resulted in numerous election manipulations. Nevertheless, the situation temporarily improved for the party after the election, as Ortiz tried to strengthen democracy again and thus enabled the UCR to achieve further success at the regional level. Ortiz, however, had to resign prematurely in 1942 because of his poor health and was replaced by his vice-president Ramón Castillo of the conservative Unión Democrática , who restored the repressive system.

Under Perón in the opposition

After Alvear's death in 1942 and the military coup in 1943, there was great upheaval in the UCR. From 1945 onwards, some of them joined the Peronists , who later founded the Partido Justicialista . The opponents of this union formed a coalition with other parties called Unión Democrática to defeat Juan Perón in the 1946 election. However, Perón clearly won the election.

As a result, the radical anti-peronist current, the unionistas , and the intransigentes , who advocated limited cooperation with the Peronists, became increasingly polarized . The intransigentes , whose leadership figures were Ricardo Balbín and Arturo Frondizi , gained the upper hand in the first Peronist presidency. So in 1951 Balbín stood as a UCR presidential candidate against Perón, but without success.

In the mid-1950s, tensions arose between the Peronists and the opposition around the UCR, which was reflected in the 1955 so-called Revolución Libertadora , a popular uprising supported by the military . As a result, Perón was forced to resign and went into exile.

Division: UCRI and UCRP

After Perón was deposed, tensions in the UCR intensified. Even under the military government, it split up: The group around Frondizi, which comprised the majority of the intransigentes , wanted to bring about elections and democratic conditions as quickly as possible, at the same time they adopted a program that made development policy ( desarrollismo ) a model for economic policy . The Unión Cívica Radical del Pueblo (UCRP), which Ricardo Balbín also joined in addition to the unionistas , wanted to wait for a vote from the base and split off from the UCR. As a result, Frondizi's group founded the Unión Cívica Radical Intransigente (UCRI).

In the 1958 presidential election, the Peronist Party (PJ) was banned. Thanks to a pact with Perón, Frondizi won the election against Balbín as his main challenger. His presidency was characterized by an attempt to accelerate industrialization by opening up to foreign capital. In 1961 he lifted the ban on Peronists again. When the PJ became governor of the important province of Buenos Aires in 1962 , the military demanded that the elections be annulled. Frondizi's refusal led to a military coup in which he was arrested. Nevertheless, the UCRI succeeded in swearing in the President of the Senate, José María Guido , who was able to hold out until the 1963 election despite the restrictions on his power by the military.

In the 1963 election, UCRP candidate Arturo Illia won . He also pursued an economic development policy. In 1966 he was deposed in a military coup.

Dictatorships and a short democratic interlude

The leader of the putschists, Juan Carlos Onganía , dissolved all parties and thus also the two sub-parties of the UCR with one of the first official acts and appointed himself president. UCRI and UCRP continued to exist underground during the dictatorship; Especially the student organization Franja Morada was able to gain protagonism during this time. Unlike the Peronist and socialist youth organizations, some of which called for armed resistance, it strictly insisted on non-violence.

In 1971, when the dictatorship opened up to redemocratization, the UCRP was given the official name of the UCR by the government under General Alejandro Agustín Lanusse . The UCRI had to rename itself to Partido Intransigente . In the following presidential elections, however, both parties could not prevent the Peronists from coming back to power with Héctor Cámpora and in the same year in new elections with Juan Perón , who had returned from exile . While Balbín, the official UCR candidate, got 20.29%, the candidate of the Partido Intransigente Oscar Alende only got 7.4%. The party then sank into insignificance. At the same time, Raúl Alfonsín, a leading figure of the young generation grew up who represented a counterpoint to the group around Balbín and represented social democratic positions.

During the military dictatorship (1976-1983) the parties' activity was suspended. However, some sub-organizations such as Franja Morada were able to continue working. While the group around Balbín supported the dictatorship at the beginning, the group around Alfonsín opposed it with sharp criticism, Alfonsín took as a lawyer investigations into the whereabouts of some " disappeared ". In 1981, the UCR and the Peronists founded the Multipartidaria , a group that openly called for democratization. After the dictatorship collapsed in 1982, Alfonsín was able to assert himself against his internal party opponents with his program, which was oriented towards social democracy and the demand to come to terms with the crimes of the dictatorship.

Democratization and two-party system with the Peronists

1983 to 1989 the UCR put the first democratic president after the military dictatorship: Raúl Alfonsín . Alfonsín were then replaced in 1989 by Carlos Menem of the Peronists, who ruled for 10 years.

In 1997, the Unión Cívica Radical and the left-wing alliance FrePaSo ( Frente País Solidario ) merged to form a center-left coalition under the name Alianza (fully Alianza para el Trabajo, la Justícia y la Educación ). With this alliance, Fernando de la Rúa was able to replace the Peronist Party in government in 1999 . The De la Rúa government resigned prematurely in December 2001 after serious unrest.

Weakening after the Argentina crisis

Since the Argentina crisis, the UCR has lost massive numbers of voters at the national level. In the 2003 presidential election, for example, her candidate only got 2.3%; in 2007 she did not put up a candidate of her own, but instead supported the majority of the electoral alliance Una Nación Avanzada of ex-economics minister Roberto Lavagna , who came third in the election.

In 2009 the UCR allied itself with the Socialist Party and the party alliance Coalición Cívica (see Coalición Cívica ARI ), which was founded by a majority of UCR dissenters, to form the center-left block Acuerdo Cívico y Social (ACyS), which won the national parliamentary elections with the Frente para la Victoria could catch up. The hope of being able to establish a strong new party bloc was not fulfilled, however, as in the following years first the Coalición Cívica, then the socialists, who in turn founded the alliance Frente Amplio Progresista with smaller left-wing parties . Before the 2011 presidential election , there was a dispute over the direction between the more conservative party leader Ernesto Sanz , the centrist Julio Cobos and Ricardo Alfonsín , son of Raúl Alfonsín, who was more inclined to the social democratic wing . Alfonsín, who ultimately ran as a candidate, only got 11.1% despite the support of some of the Peronists and was third behind the socialist Hermes Binner . Nevertheless, after this election, the UCR is the second largest block in the Argentine House of Representatives after the Frente para la Victoria with 38 MPs.

After the unsuccessful election, Mario Barletta , the former mayor of Santa Fe , became party chairman in 2011. He was followed by Ernesto Sanz (2013–2015), José Manuel Corral (2015–2017) and Alfredo Cornejo, the governor of the province of Mendoza (since 2017).

Cambiemos electoral alliance (2015)

In 2015, the UCR, together with the Coalición-Cívica ARI and the Propuesta Republicana (PRO), formed the electoral alliance Cambiemos, with the aim of breaking the presidency of the Partido Justicialista . In the internal primaries, the UCR candidate and then chairman Ernesto Sanz only came second by far. Presidential candidate was Mauricio Macri appointed to the subsequent presidential election in 2015 won. The UCR has been assigned a number of ministerial posts in the Macri cabinet .

Spin-offs

In the course of history, numerous small parties split off from the UCR, but only a few of them lasted for a long time.

More recently, the two main branches were Afirmación para una República Igualitaria (founded in 2001 by Elisa Carrió , now Coalición Cívica-ARI ), a party belonging to social democracy , and Recrear para el Crecimiento (founded in 2002 by Ricardo López Murphy ), a more economic liberalism Attributable split that merged in 2009 with the conservative party Compromiso para el Cambio from the city of Buenos Aires to form Propuesta Republicana . Both parties were successful in electoral elections in some regions of the country, but are hardly represented in others.

Well-known politicians of the UCR

The most famous members since the founding of the party include:

See also: History of Argentina

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Afiliados ( Memento of the original from June 27, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 679 kB), information sheet on membership in political parties, 1st semester 2011. Official website of the Argentine federal justice system @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.pjn.gov.ar
  2. ^ Perón, Frondizi y el pacto que marcó una época , La Nación, February 22, 2008
  3. ↑ Miguel Bonasso: El presidente que no fue. Los archivos ocultos del peronismo , Planeta, Buenos Aires 1997, p. 418
  4. ↑ 2003 election results ( Memento of the original from June 19, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at the Argentine Ministry of the Interior @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.mininterior.gov.ar
  5. ^ Bloques , website of the Argentine National Congress
  6. ↑ Barletta asume en la UCR, aunque hay tironeos por el resto de la conducción , Noticias Terra, December 15, 2011

Web link