Christian Democrats

Christian Democrats Moderate right-of-centre parties which in many European and some Latin American countries have been the dominant right-wing parties since World War II. Originally, their social and moral values were rooted in Christianity, while their openness to economic liberalism and (in Europe) to European integration ensured considerable middle-class and commercial support. The success of Christian Democrats has been a crucial factor in the political stability of postwar Europe, since it was the absence of moderate conservative parties committed to upholding the respective political systems they were operating in that had contributed to the weakness of these political systems in early twentieth-century continental Europe. The processes of secularization and globalization from the 1960s eroded many of the traditional milieus from which the Christian Democrats derived their support. From the 1990s, they had to contend with rival populist right-wing movements. These in part eclipsed the traditional Christian Democrats, as in Italy, and in part it supported them, as in Austria or the Netherlands. Only in a few countries such as Germany did the Christian Democrats appear to be strong enough to integrate such populist movements and remain the sole broad-based right-wing political movement at the national level.

CDU (Germany); Christian Democratic Party (Italy); Forza Italia; Berlusconi; Haider