The PLD was founded by Professor Juan Bosch on December 15, 1973, upon resigning as president of the PRD, arguing that the party had fulfilled its historical mission and had lost its essence.
While he was active in the political arena, Bosch was always the leader, guide and presidential candidate of the PLD. With Bosch as a candidate, the PLD could never come to power. After his retirement, the PLD managed to govern the country for 20 years with two presidents: Leonel Fernández, for three terms, and Danilo Medina for two terms. As a result of an irrational confrontation between these two leaders and former presidents, the PLD split in October 2019 and as a result lost power.
October, the great challenge of the PLD
Although it lost the last elections and there is a smear campaign and judicial persecution against it, today the PLD is one of the main political forces in the nation. It is chaired by Danilo Medina, who is the best political builder in the country and one of the main people responsible for building the structure of the PLD. It was no coincidence that in the 1980s, when Rafael Alburquerque resigned as secretary general of the PLD and took with him an important part of the PLD structure at the time, the person Juan Bosch called to rebuild the PLD went to Danilo Medina. Today, Danilo is fully dedicated to organically strengthening the PLD, rescuing its image and ensuring that it emerges unified from the October process.
That is the great challenge of the PLD at this time: Choose your candidate without any conflict. The main objective is to break with the image of division and weakness left by the candidate election process in that complicated October 2019.
As a candidate, Bosch had no competition
When founding the PLD, Juan Bosch said that this organization was “a unique party in Latin America” and that the main function was “to complete the work of Duarte and the Trinitarians.”
Certainly the PLD emerged with a very special reality and very different from all the Dominican political organizations that had existed up to that time. The first thing is that it was born from the hand of a former president of the Republic and one of the most prominent intellectuals in Latin America, who had formed what was until then the strongest party in the nation, the PRD. But the PLD also had the criteria of a cadre party, in the Leninist or leftist style, where the structure was fundamental for political action.
At that time, to become a member of the organic structure of the PLD, the applicants had to go through a so-called Circle of Studies, where they learned about the historical and social vision that Bosch had of Dominican society and other aspects of history. From that circle they left graduates and already prepared to act politically. The PLD in principle was a kind of school for leaders, where everyone was prepared and had to respect party discipline. That was basic, fundamental and inviolable. To give importance to discipline, Bosch said that the two oldest organizations of humanity, the Church and the Army, had been maintained for so long out of respect for their rules and discipline. And that’s what the PLD did in its beginnings.
Based on this reality, when the PLD decided to go to the first elections in May 1978, the logical and elementary thing was that it take Bosch as its presidential candidate. The procedure at that time was not direct voting by the majority of the members, but voting by the organizations. This procedure was maintained during the five occasions in which Bosch aspired to the presidency from the PLD.
Bosch was the candidate of his party for the elections of 1978, 1982, 1986, 1990 and 1994. At that time his candidacy was always unquestionable and approved practically unanimously. The expectations and the inconveniences arose with the vice-presidential candidacy, which was a power of the candidate, but had to be endorsed by its main organisms, the Political Committee and the Central Committee. In 1978 and 1982, Bosch chose the secretary general at the time, Dr. Rafael Alburquerque, as his running mate, and there were no problems.
But in 1984 there was a crisis in the PLD and Rafael Albuqueque resigned from that party. This caused that for the 1986 elections, Bosch chose as his ballot companion Dr. José Joaquín Bidó Medina, a calm and conciliatory leader who did not create any difficult situation.
One of the first difficult situations for the PLD in terms of shaping that party’s presidential ticket occurred in the May 1990 elections, which were projected to be overwhelmingly won by Bosch and the PLD. Surprisingly for the entire political world, instead of Bosch choosing one of the historical leaders of the PLD as his vice-presidential companion, he decided on a businessman from Santiago named José Francisco Hernandez. That was a political bomb for the PLD.
