The National Transportation Council (Conachotrán) represented by Fredermido Ferreras Díaz and Leonel Ferreras González sent a motion to the Constitutional Court on 12 March 2021 asking it to declare as article 101 of the by-laws of the ruling Modern Revolutionary Party (PRM) that prohibit presidential re-election in the party in violation with the Dominican Constitution.
It is now known that Article 101 of the PRM statutes establishes that a party convention must be convened to debate the issue and that until that happens presidential re-election is prohibited. This is a step President Abinader must overcome to seek to be the PRM candidate in the 2024 election.
Ferreras Diaz is the same person who in 2017 submitted an action seeking to annul the transitory provision of the Constitution that banned former President Danilo Medina from running again as a presidential candidate.
As reported in El Caribe, the PRM was born with dissident groups that split from the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD). In that party, re-election has always been prohibited in its by laws and has been a source of internal contradictions in the organization. In fact, no president of the PRD has ever been reelected and in the only case that this party won consecutive elections, 1978 and 1982, it was with a candidate different from the one who governed despite the fact that the Constitution of the Republic did not prohibit it.
El Caribe recalls that in 2004, former President Hipólito Mejía ran for re-election after modifying the Constitution. This motion divided the party due to the fierce opposition of the president of the organization at that time, Hatuey de Camps. The PRD lost those elections and De Camps was expelled from the organization and founded today’s Partido Revolucionario Social Demócrata (PRSD).
Read more in Spanish:
El Caribe
25 March 2021