Aliança Renovadora Nacional

(ARENA)

   / NATIONAL ALLIANCE FOR RENEWAL

   The progovernment political party during the military dictatorship in Brazil (1964–1985). It was created in 1965 as part of a strict two-party system. Its rival, created at the same time, was the Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (MDB, Brazilian Democratic Movement), the legal opposition party. Both parties existed until November 1979, when the two-party system was scrapped.

   From 1945 to 1965, there were three principal political parties in Brazil: the centrist Partido Social Democrático (PSD, Social Democratic Party), the leftist Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro (PTB, Brazilian Labor Party), and the conservative União Democrática Nacional (UDN, National Democratic Union). These parties were abolished when the two-party system was put in place. ARENA drew largely from the UDN and the PSD; MDB drew largely from the PTB, but also drew from the PSD.

   ARENA consistently controlled Congress. After the November 1966 congressional elections, ARENA held 47 seats in the Senate to the MDB’s 19, and 277 seats in the Chamber of Deputies to the MDB’s 132. By the mid-1970s, however, the MDB threatened to take control through the ballot box, and the government had to take steps to maintain ARENA’s dominance. In 1977, for example, President Ernesto Geisel introduced a set of constitutional reforms known as the April Package, one of which allowed one-third of the senators to be appointed.

   Because of ARENA’s control, Congress could be expected to rubber-stamp most government proposals. But ARENA sometimes infuriated the military by acting independently. In 1968, for example, ARENA members of Congress protested a police crackdown on university students, called for presidents to be elected directly—they were then elected by a roll-call vote in Congress—and voted against revoking the immunity of Márcio Moreira Alves, an MDB congressman who had spoken out against the government’s use of torture. ARENA’s act of defiance in the Moreira Alves vote particularly rankled—so much so that the government responded by issuing an Ato Institucional (AI, Institutional Act), one of whose provisions allowed the president to close Congress, a provision that was temporarily invoked. Moreover, in 1969, when the government revised the constitution of 1967, the changes included a party-fidelity measure, which required legislators at both the federal and the state levels to vote the party line when the party leadership considered a vote to be of primary importance.

   In 1979, to weaken the opposition, all of which was funneled through the MDB, the government abolished the two-party system and required all new parties to use the word partido (political party) in their names. ARENA became the Partido Democrático Social (PDS, Social Democratic Party). On 15 January 1985 an opposition president came to power, defeating the PDS candidate 480 to 180 in the electoral college.