Intransigent Radicals

The Intransigent Radicals were a nationalist faction of the Radical Party which emerged during the 1930s in opposition to the undemocratic governments of the period and in repudiation of the more conservative Radical Party faction led by Marcelo T. de Alvear. Vindicating the yrigoyenista tradition, they were inspired in the 1930s and early 1940s by the governor of Córdoba, Amadeo Sabattini, who vigorously promoted economic nationalism, an interventionist state, and strict neutrality in World War II, a program encapsulated in the party's founding document, the 1945 Carta de Avellaneda.

Organized as the Movimiento de Intransigencia y Renovación (MIR) after 1945, the Intransigents lost a bitter power struggle with the more conservative faction of their party, the so-called unionists, in the selection of the Unión Democrática ticket chosen to run against Juan Perón in the 1946 election, but dominated the party during the Peronist government (1946–1955). In 1956 they established a separate party, the Intransigent Radical Civic Union (UCRI), which brought Arturo Frondizi to power in the 1958 presidential election. Frondizi's drifting away from many of the party's principles, especially those concerning issues of economic nationalism, weakened the Intransigents' credibility.

Frondizi's ouster in a 1962 coup d'état and his establishment in 1964 of a separate political party, the Movement of Integration and Development (MID), effectively led to the Intransigent Radicals' demise. They ran as a separate party for the last time in the 1963 election won by the Radical Civic Union of the People (UCRP), though they were briefly resuscitated in the 1980s in the form of the Intransigent Party (PI), led by former intransigente governor of Buenos Aires, Oscar Allende. The PI was the most important left-of-center party during the first years of Raúl Alfonsín's Radical administration, though it too eventually disbanded.

See alsoFrondizi, Arturo .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Marcelo Luis Acuña, De Frondizi a Alfonsín: La tradición política del radicalismo, vols. 1 and 2 (1985).

Celia Szusterman, Frondizi and the Politics of Developmentalism in Argentina, 1955–62 (1993).

Additional Bibliography

Altamirano, Carlos. Arturo Frondizi, o, El hombre de ideas como político. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998.

García Sebastiani, Marcela. Los antiperonistas en la Argentina peronista: Radicales y socialistas en la política argentina entre 1943 y 1951. Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2005.

Persello, Ana Virginia. El partido radical: Gobierno y oposición, 1916–1943. Buenos Aires: Siglo veintiuno editores Argentina, 2004.

                                          James P. Brennan