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Dominican Republic Political Parties
Political parties and a political party system in the
modern
sense had a very short history in the Dominican Republic,
dating
back only to the early 1960s. Most parties were weakly
organized,
had weak and inexperienced political leadership, were
neither
very ideological nor programmatic, and were generally
based on
personalistic followings rather than on concrete programs.
Beginning in the mid-1960s, two main parties, or
movements,
had dominated Dominican politics. These were the PRD and
the
Reformist Party (Partido Reformista--PR). Both these
parties had
gone through several reorganizations.
The PRD had been founded in 1939 by exiles from the
Trujillo
dictatorship. It functioned as an exiled organization for
twentytwo years, before returning to the Dominican Republic in
1961
after Trujillo's assassination.
In the late 1980s, the PRD was a left-of-center,
democratic
political party. Strongly oriented toward social justice,
it
sought to assist peasants and workers. Although
nationalistic,
the PRD belonged to the Socialist International. Its
platform
supported both political and economic democracy. A
strongly
reformist party, the PRD nonetheless was committed to
implementing change through democratic means.
On the strength of this program, the PRD, led by the
charismatic Juan Bosch, had won the 1962 election, the
freest in
the country's history, by a two-to-one margin. Bosch was
overthrown, however, after only seven months in office.
The PRD
organized a constitutionalist revolt, in 1965, aimed at
restoring
democratic government, but the revolution was put down
militarily
by the United States, an action that made Bosch and many
PRD
leaders bitterly resentful of the United States. Perceived
as a
symbol of instability and revolution, Bosch lost the 1966
election to Balaguer. For the next twelve years, the PRD
went
into eclipse; it functioned primarily as the Dominican
Republic's
largest opposition party. After a major split, Bosch left
to form
his own, more radical, PLD.
In 1978, under Guzmán, and again in 1982 under Jorge,
the PRD
won the national elections. It governed moderately and
without
the rancor of the past, but as it tried to put its social
program
into effect, it ran up against the constraints of
austerity.
The PRD had a clear ideological program and was the
best
organized political party in the country; however, it was
torn by
personal and ideological differences. Pitted against each
other
were its right wing, led by Majluta; its center, led by
Jorge;
and its left wing, led by José Francisco Peña Gómez. These
differences became even more pronounced in 1989. Former
president
Jorge was indicted for corruption, and hence his
popularity
plummeted; Majluta was neither trusted nor respected by
many in
the party and the nation; and Peña Gómez was reportedly
contemplating the launching of his own independent
movement,
which would further split the PRD. A number of younger
leaders,
such as Jorge protegé Hatuey de Camps Jiménez, also rose
to
prominence within the party in the 1980s. When unified,
the PRD
was usually strong enough to win elections, but when
divided it
usually lost. After the death of Trujillo, the PRD was
divided
more often than it was unified.
The other major party was the PR, the personal machine
of
President Balaguer. More conservative than the PRD, the PR
lacked
a clear-cut program. It consisted of officeholders, job
seekers,
and persons loyal to Balaguer. The PR functioned more as a
patronage mechanism than as a party with an identifiable
ideology. Balaguer used this political machine to win
elections
in 1966, 1970, and 1974. The PR dispensed jobs and favors
and, in
general, helped him to govern.
In 1985 Balaguer promoted a union between the PR and
the
Revolutionary Social Christian Party (Partido
Revolucionario
Social Cristiano--PRSC). The PRSC was the established
Christian
Democratic party in the country; it was widely respected,
but it
had little electoral strength. Balaguer gave the PRSC the
leadership and the electoral support that it had lacked.
The
PRSC, in turn, gave Balaguer the support of its trade
union,
student, and peasant organizations; its legitimacy as a
serious
Christian Democratic party; and its connections with the
Christian Democratic International. The new party
designated
itself the Social Christian Reformist Party (Partido
Reformista
Social Cristiano--PRSC), changing its name slightly, but
retaining the old initials. The PRSC won the 1986 election
by a
slim margin over the PRD.
The third major party, Bosch's PLD, won 18 percent of
the
vote in 1986. It was more radical than the PRD and more
antiUnited States. Its program called for the establishment of
a
"revolutionary dictatorship" and for close relations with
Cuba
and the Soviet Union. The PLD appealed to young people and
to
those whose disaffection with the prevailing social,
political,
and economic system in the Dominican Republic had reached
an
extreme degree; it gained popular support during the 1980s
as a
result of the country's manifold economic and political
problems.
Balaguer and Bosch had long been personal, as well as
political and ideological, rivals. Indeed, by 1989 these
two men
had been jousting with each other politically for some
fifty
years. In 1989 both were in their eighties. They were the
two
main protagonists, the two rival caudillos, of modern
Dominican
politics. Their rivalry delineated the overlap between
traditional personalism and modern party politics.
The Dominican Republic's several minor parties were
weakly
organized, and they usually represented the personal
followings
of individual caudillos. In the 1986 election, none of
these
parties received as much as 1 percent of the vote, which
made
their eligibility to compete in future elections
questionable.
Several of these personal machines were simply testing the
political waters in 1986, and they might come back in
reorganized
form in future elections. Another possibility was that
their
leaders might try to merge their organizations with the
larger
parties, or perhaps themselves become the candidates of
the
larger parties. These relations illustrated the fluidity
and the
lack of institutionalization of the Dominican party
system.
The extreme-left and communist parties never had much
of a
popular following. Bosch's formation of the PLD further
undermined the potential support of the extreme left. Many
Dominican peasants were conservative rather than radical,
and the
weak unions were increasingly oriented toward
"bread-and-butter"
issues rather than revolutionary action. In addition, the
close
ties of the Dominican Republic to the United States and
the
absence of widespread class conflict among
Dominicans--Haitians
formed the cane-cutting "proletariat" in the countryside,
and,
therefore, the potential for class conflict was sapped by
racial,
cultural, and nationalistic considerations--further
diminished
the possibility of a strong communist movement.
The two main far-left parties were the Communist Party
of the
Dominican Republic (Partido Comunista de la República
Dominicana-
-Pacoredo)--a splinter group of the Dominican Communist
Party
(Partido Comunista Dominicano--PCD)--and the Socialist
Bloc
(Bloque Socialista--BS). These two parties chose not to
field
candidates in the 1986 election, in part because doing so
would
have revealed their weak electoral appeal. The Moscow-line
PCD
did enter the 1986 election, and it received only 4,756
votes--
considerably less than 1 percent of the total.
Nevertheless, all
the far-left parties actively criticized the PRD and the
PRSC and
publicly presented their own points of view. The communist
parties had little popular following in their own right,
but by
attaching themselves to the nationalistic Bosch and the
PLD they
could conceivably wield influence out of proportion to
their
numbers.
Some signs indicated that a basic and more stable
two-party
system, consisting of the left-of-center PRD and the
right-of-
center PRSC, might be evolving in the Dominican Republic
in the
late 1980s. A two-and-a-half party system, with the PLD
joining
these other two, represented another possibility.
Nevertheless,
the political system continued to be quite fluid;
personalities
still counted at least as much as parties. Other routes to
power
existed besides party activism and elections; therefore,
the
consolidation of a stable, functioning party system could
not yet
be taken for granted.
Data as of December 1989
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