The Conservative Party was an Ecuadorian conservative party formed in 1869. Initially associated with the military of Ecuador the PC became one of the two great parties of state in the country, alternating in power with the Ecuadorian Radical Liberal Party. Its traditional support basis has been amongst the landowning classes, as well as merchants and artisans and it tended to favour a unitary structure rather than federalism.
Like many traditional political parties in South America the PC was a broad coalition featuring a number of interest groups. Foremost amongst these was the army which usually worked in close tandem with the PC. The Roman Catholic Church was the other great influence on the PC and the party sought to represent Catholicism in its most traditional form, to the extent that more radical elements broke away to form the Social Christian Party under Ponce Enríquez. The two groups did subsequently co-operate however. A more radical Christian tendency also existed in the form of the Frente Anti-Comunista de Defensa Nacional, an anti-communistmilitia group active during the late 1940s. Distinct from the Christian tendency, although active around the same time as the FADN was the Alianza Revolucionaria Nacionalista Ecuatoriana, a tendency inspired by fascism that sought to directly confront leftists.
Later years
By the 1960s the PC, along with their Liberal rivals, had faded somewhat from their leading position in Ecuadorian politics. In the 1968 election they backed the unsuccessful candidacy of Ponce Enríquez although he ran as a Social Christian candidate. In the elections of 1978-9 they again backed the Social Christian candidate for the Presidency - who this time was Sixto Durán Ballén - although the nine seats the party captured in Congress temporarily made them the third largest party in the body. By the 1980s both the Conservatives and Liberals were junior partners in the Frente de Reconstrución Nacional coalition of León Febres Cordero, which was dominated by the Social Christian Party. The party continues to be an active force amongst its traditional stronghold of the landowners but has suffered due to the departure of Popular Democracy and the introduction of universal suffrage which significantly reduced landowner influence. They held only two Congressional seats in 1984, which was reduced to one two years later. They retained independent membership of the Congress up to and including the 1996 election, since when they have been subsumed in coalitions. In the 2009 elections, a remnant of the Conservative Party, known as the Social Conservative Movement of Carchi, won a seat in the National Assembly of Ecuador from Carchi Province.
