National Renewal Party

The National Renewal Party (Pelaxian: Partido Renovación Nacional, PRN) was the sole of the Estado Social regime in Rosario, and, from 1976, Delepasia, founded in August 1933 and dominated by Fernando Pascual during most of its existence.

The PRN was the largest party represented in the General Assembly of Rosaria (1919) and the National Assembly of Delepasia and had coexisted with two other legal parties (Democratic Revitalisation Party and Popular Reform Party) making up the United Front for the Preservation of Morality coalition. However, these minor parties were completely subservient to the PRN and had to accept the PRN's "leading role" as a condition of their existence.

The PRN membership was mostly drawn from local notables: landowners, professionals and businessmen, Catholics, monarchists or conservative republicans. The PRN was never a militant or very active organisation.

Once Pascual assumed the leadership, the PRN became the only party legally allowed to lead the government under the Estado Social. Uniquely, Pascual had decided that the PRN would be the antithesis of a political party, and thus would be an ancillary body rather than a source of political power. At no stage did it appear that Pascual wished to fulfill the central role that most far-right revolutionary parties wished to fulfill; in fact, it was meant to be a platform of conservatism, not a revolutionary vanguard.

The PRN's main ideology was corporatism, and it took as many inspirations from Catholic encyclicals and other notable far-right parties as it could such as Bertocca's fascist party in Caphiria. Compared to most other ruling far-right parties at the time, the PRN played a much smaller role in its regime. The PRN was set up to control and constrain public opinion rather than to mobilise it, and ministers, diplomats and civil servants were not required to join the party.

Scholarly opinion varies on whether the Estado Social and the PRN should be considered truly fascist or not. Pascual himself had made scathing comments about the "exaltation of youth, the cult of direct action and force, the overbearing principle of the superiority of state political power in social life, and the tendency for organising masses behind a single leader and cult of personality" as fundamental differences between fascism and the Catholic corporatism of the Estado Social. Some scholars have preferred to consider the Rosarian and Delepasian Estado Social as conservative authoritarian rather than straight-up fascism. However, there is a sizeable group of scholars who argue that the Estado Social should be considered fascist.

History
The party was founded in 1933 during the Dictadura Perfecta period in Rosario. Officially it was not a political party but rather an "organisation of unity to serve as the beacon of strength and unity of all the Delepasians". Pascual in the speech that launched the party, was vague in terms of its role, and he incorporated all the independent parties supporting the dictatorship, whether they were republican, monarchic, or just Catholic. Its first organic principles expressly declared that "all citizens, regardless of their political or religious beliefs" would be admitted so long as they adhered to the principles of Pascual's speech of 5 July 1933.

The PRN was formed as a subservient umbrella organisation to support the regime itself. It was one of three parties that were legally allowed under the Estado Social regime through much of its existence, the other two parties being the subservient Democratic Revitalisation Party and Popular Reform Party; all other political parties were banned and persecuted, this eventually included the National Falangist Party, led by Diego Hernandez, who originally supported the regime. In 1936 Pascual arrested and exiled Hernandez as a part of a purge against the National Falangists. The National Falangists soon broke into factions, some opting to go into exile while the vast majority opted to join the PRN. Pascual denounced the National Falangists as "inspired by certain foreign models" (meaning Caphiric fascism) and condemned their "exaltation of youth, the cult of direct action and force, the overbearing principle of the superiority of state political power in social life, and the tendency for organising masses behind a single leader and cult of personality" as fundamental differences between fascism and the PRN's conservative Catholic corporatism.

The first leader of the PRN was Colonel Carlos Lopez. The PRN's Central Committee composition indicated that the party was intended to support the regime rather than militate for it. Pascual became party president, and Ernesto Calles, a former member of the ULR, was nominated as party vice president. The first Central Committee was composed by Javier Delgado, Emiliano Rosas, a judge and an integralist monarchist, and Antonio Huerta, who had been linked to the Union for National Strength (Unión por la Fuerza Nacional) in the 1920s. Appointment to lead the party meant either a "retirement" or a prestigious pause from government duties. The absence of youth was a characteristic of the PRN, particularly during the 1930s and 1940s. At the first Congress, 79% of delegates were over 40 years old.

According to historian Otelo Salazar, the PRN is an example of extreme weakness among dictatorships with weak parties. There was no intern activity until 1938, and from 1939 onwards, after the creation of the regime's new institutions, the PRN embarked on a period of lethargy from which it did not emerge from until 1949. This lethargy can be partly explained by the affirmation by the regime that it did not attribute great importance to it beyond its utility as an electoral and legitimating vehicle.

The Estado Social also created state bodies for propaganda, youth and labour, but they were not connected in any way with the party.

In 1943 Pascual recognised that the PRN's activities "were successively diminished until they had almost been extinguished entirely". With the end of the Second Great War that same year, the PRN came to life again. In 1944, Pascual announced a liberalisation programme designed to restore civil rights that had been suppressed during the Second Great War in hopes of improving the image of his regime in Occidental circles. The measures included parliamentary elections, the creation of two additional "government-approved" parties (the Democratic Revitalisation Party and the Popular Reform Party), a general political amnesty, restoration of freedom of the press, curtailment of legal repression and a commitment to introduce the right of habeas corpus. The opposition to Pascual started to organise itself around a broad coalition, the Coalition of Independent Democrats (CDI), which ranged from ultra-Catholics and fringe elements on the extreme right to the Marxists on the extreme left. Initially, the moderate opposition controlled the CDI, but it soon became strongly influenced by the Marxists, which controlled its youth wing. In the leadership over the years were several Marxists, among them having been, , Francisco Carvalho, , and.

The opposition Coalition of Independent Democrats was legal between 1944 and 1983, but even then, the political system was so heavily rigged that it had no realistic chance of winning, much less gain any representation.

The party won two-thirds of all seats in legislative elections from 1944 to 1992. Opposition candidates were nominally allowed after 1944 but prematurely withdrew in all legislative elections between 1944 and 1992. In 1988, just weeks after Pascual had been replaced as a leader and prime minister by Nicolas Torres, the name of the party was changed to Acción Nacional Unida (United National Action). Subsequent to Pascual's retirement, the party faced formal competition in the 1988 Delepasian legislative election. However, the conduct of this election was little different from past legislative elections, with the ANU winning two-thirds of all in a landslide, with the remaining third split between the PRD and the PRP.

The party had no real philosophy apart from support for the regime. The National Falangist leader, Diego Hernandez, criticised the PRN in 1949 as a "grouping of milquetoaste moderates of all parties, bourgeois without any soul or faith in the national and revolutionary imperatives of our time, just blind obedience towards the regime".

As a result of its lack of ideology, it disappeared in short order after the Delepasian Revolution of 1994. It has never been revived, though the far-right Delepasian Alternative, which has claimed to be its heir, has won minimal seats in the Congress of the Commons in modern Rumahoki.