Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement

Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (PMDB), centrist Brazilian Christian Democratic political party.

The Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (PMDB) was founded in 1980 by members of the Brazilian Democratic Movement, which had been created in the mid-1960s as the official opposition to the military government but had dissolved in 1979. The PMDB, which endorsed democratization and the return of civilian rule, originated as a moderate leftist party, but it soon began to attract widespread support, particularly by moderating its policies and merging with the centre-right Popular Party. In 1985 the PMDB joined with the Liberal Front Party and other groups in Brazil’s first civilian elections since 1964 to support the election of Tancredo de Almeida Neves as president and of José Sarney as vice president. (Sarney was inaugurated as president after Neves died before his term of office was to begin.)

By 1986 the PMDB was Brazil’s largest party, winning control of both houses of the national legislature and 22 of 23 state governorships. Subsequently, however, internal dissension between the party’s moderate and leftist elements deepened, particularly over Sarney’s support for maintaining Brazil’s presidential form of government, and in 1988 a number of leftists split to form the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira; PSDB). Nonetheless, the PMDB continued to show strength in congressional elections, winning pluralities in both houses in the 1990 and 1994 elections. It also enjoyed success in many state elections.

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The PMDB was a key component of the electoral coalition of PSDB presidential candidate Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who was elected president in 1994 and reelected in 1998. Throughout Cardoso’s term, the PMDB generally backed his policies, but, despite its large number of deputies, it was hampered by a lack of policy coherence and by weak leadership, and in 2002 it decided against running a presidential candidate and in favour of backing the PSDB’s candidate.

Following the election, however, it generally supported the government of Pres. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores; PT). In the 2006 election the PMDB again chose not to run a presidential candidate but grew from the third largest delegation in the Chamber of Deputies to the largest and continued to support “Lula’s” government, becoming its principal ally. The PMDB then not only backed the successful presidential candidacy of the PT’s Dilma Rousseff in the 2010 election, but in a number of states it also formed a joint ticket with the PT, which supplanted it as the largest party in the Chamber, with the PMDB slipping to second, where it remained in the 2014 election, again contested in alliance with the PT and incumbent President Rousseff. The PMDB began to distance itself from the PT in 2015, however, when some of its leaders were drawn into a scandal that swelled around the PT and Petrobras, the largely state-owned oil and gas company. In March 2016, as calls for Rousseff’s impeachment grew, the PMDB withdrew from the ruling coalition.