Democratic Action (Venezuela)
민주행동당 (베네수엘라)
Venezuelan social-democratic party founded in 1941 by Rómulo Betancourt and others. The country's first modern mass party, it led the first democratic government of 1945–1948 and was outlawed under the dictatorship that followed the 1948 coup. After democracy was restored in 1958 it joined COPEI in the Puntofijo Pact, forming a forty-year two-party system in which it provided four presidents; it was closely linked to the trade union confederation CTV and joined the Socialist International. It declined after the Caracazo of 1989 and the impeachment of Carlos Andrés Pérez in 1993.
In depth
Democratic Action grew out of the political organisations formed by the student Generation of 1928. The Revolutionary Left Group (ARDI), founded by Rómulo Betancourt in exile in Colombia in 1931, became the Venezuelan Organisation Movement (ORVE) in 1936 and was then dissolved into the National Democratic Party (PDN); after Isaías Medina Angarita legalised all political parties, Betancourt, the novelist Rómulo Gallegos, the poet Andrés Eloy Blanco and others founded Acción Democrática on 13 September 1941. In October 1945, together with young army officers, it overthrew Medina's government and led Betancourt's Revolutionary Junta, and in 1947 Gallegos won what is generally believed to be the first free and fair election in Venezuelan history (the trienio). In this period the development minister Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo established the "50/50" principle, under which the state took at least half of the oil companies' profits. When the 1948 coup overthrew Gallegos the party was outlawed under the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez and its leaders went into exile.
With the restoration of democracy in 1958 the party signed the Puntofijo Pact with COPEI and the Democratic Republican Union to guarantee recognition of election results. Betancourt in 1958, Raúl Leoni in 1963, Carlos Andrés Pérez in 1973, Jaime Lusinchi in 1983 and Pérez again in 1988 held the presidency for twenty-five non-consecutive years between 1958 and 1993. The party became a disciplined national organisation reaching into trade unions, peasant organisations and student movements and dominated the Confederation of Workers of Venezuela, but it also fostered the partisan capture of the state, clientelism and bureaucratisation. In 1960 a left wing broke away to form the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), which took up armed struggle; in 1967, when the Betancourt faction overturned Luis Beltrán Prieto Figueroa's primary victory, Prieto left to found the People's Electoral Movement (MEP), and the party suffered its first defeat in 1968. These splits weakened the Marxist and radical nationalist currents within it, and the party joined the Socialist International as one of Latin America's main social-democratic parties.
The Puntofijo system broke down in the economic crisis of the 1980s. When Pérez's second government implemented the IMF austerity package in 1989, the Caracazo followed, and the party itself, seeing the package as a betrayal, withdrew its support in Congress. Pérez was impeached for embezzlement in 1993, and after the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998 the party went into opposition. It boycotted the 2005 legislative elections, joined the opposition Democratic Unity Roundtable for the 2010 and 2015 elections, and left it in 2018.