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Portugal Party of the Social Democratic Center
The Party of the Social Democratic Center (Partido do
Centro
Democrático Social--CDS) was a Christian democratic party
to the
right of the political spectrum. Though not officially a
religious party, the CDS was linked to mainly conservative
Portuguese Catholicism and most of its officials and
followers
were Roman Catholic. Unlike some other Christian
democratic
parties, the conservative CDS did not advocate
liberation theology (see Glossary).
The party was founded in 1975 by Diogo
Freitas do Amaral, a respected politician and a professor
of
administrative law.
The CDS won 15.9 percent of the vote in the 1976
elections
and for a time formed a government with the PS. It
increased its
power when it formed an electoral coalition with the PSD
in 1979
and was in power until the coalition ended in 1983. Since
then
the party lost much of its electoral support, gaining only
a
little more than 4 percent of the vote in the 1987 and
1991
parliamentary elections, and seemed consigned to lesser
political
significance. The strength of the PSD at the polls meant
that the
CDS was no longer needed to form center-right governments.
A
decline of the PSD seemed the only opportunity for the CDS
to
return to power, either with the PSD or with the PS.
Data as of January 1993
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