Democratic Action (Venezuela)

Democratic Action (Spanish:Acción Democrática, abbreviated as AD) is a Venezuelan centrist political party established in 1941.

The party and its antecedents played an important role in the early years of Venezuelan democracy, and led the government during Venezuela's first democratic period (1945–1948). After an intervening decade of dictatorship (1948–1958) saw AD excluded from power, four presidents came from Acción Democrática from the 1960s to the 1990s. By the end of the 1990s, however, the party's credibility was almost nonexistent, mostly because of the corruption and poverty that Venezuelans experienced during the last two full-term administrations of the party's time in power, namely, those of Jaime Lusinchi (1984–1989) and Carlos Andrés Pérez (1989–1993). The latter president was impeached for corruption in 1993, and spent several years in prison as a result. Since the 1998 election of Hugo Chávez, a range of newer parties (such as A New Era and Justice First) have been more prominent in opposition to Chávez. In the 2015 legislative elections held on 6 December, AD backed the opposition electoral alliance Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) which managed to grasp a supermajority. AD won 26 constituency representatives out of 167 seats in the unicameral National Assembly: It is the second largest opposition party after Justice First. AD General Secretary Henry Ramos Allup is the current President of the National Assembly.