Democratic and Social Centre (Spain)
The Centro Democrático y Social (CDS) (Democratic and Social Centre) is a Spanish party with a liberal orientation.
The CDS was founded on 29 June 1982 by Adolfo Suárez González, Spanish Prime Minister from June 1976 to January 1981, as a split from the then ruling party Unión de Centro Democrático.
In October 1982, the CDS won 600,000 votes and 2 deputies in the elections to the Spanish Congress of Deputies. In 1986, the CDS won 1,800,000 votes and 19 seats, making it the third strongest political force in the country. In the municipal elections, the elections in the Autonomous Communities and in the European elections of 1987, it managed to enter 13 Community parliaments and registered around 6,000 municipal councillors, 684 mayors, just over 200 seats in provinces and Autonomous Communities and 7 MEPs.
In January 1988 the CDS joined the Liberal International. After heavy losses in the 1991 municipal elections, Adolfo Suárez González resigned as party president. Many personalities and members, as well as almost the entire electorate, subsequently migrated to the Partido Popular (PP).
In the 1993 parliamentary elections, the CDS lost all its congressional seats. Since then it has been without mandates at the national or regional level. At the municipal level, it has 54 remaining city council members.
Between 1995 and 2002, the party name and party orientation changed briefly, but returned at the X. Party Congress in October 2002.
In the parliamentary election of 14 March 2004, the CDS obtained 34,101 votes. In 2006, the eleventh congress of the CDS decided by a large majority to dissolve the party and annex it to the Partido Popular, which was subsequently carried out.
Already at the dissolution party conference, however, several members had also spoken out against joining the PP. This led to the founding of several successor parties after the dissolution of the CDS. The largest of these is the Centro Democrático Liberal, which also became a member of the European party ELDR. In addition, the Centro Democrático Español was formed.
In addition, some members of the CDS, who had spoken out against joining the PP, held an extraordinary "twelfth" party congress in 2007, which followed the statutes of the (actually dissolved) party and elected Fabian Villalabeitia Copena as the new party president. This party, which sees itself as a continuation of the CDS, also stood in the 2008 Spanish parliamentary elections, but due to organisational difficulties only in Madrid and Almería, where it obtained a total of 1327 votes.
