Reformist Centre, or Reformist centre, is a political term used in various countries around the world to define various kinds of political thought, but always connected with the centre, moderation and social reformism.
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The Spanish People's Party is the main political force to use the term Reformist centre. Reformist Centre is used by the People's Party for defining itself ideologically since the second half of the 1990s, with the intention of including all the ideologies that it affirms to have in its middle: right, conservatism, Christian democracy, and liberalism.
According to the article 2 (Ideology), of the status of the People's Party:
The People's Party defines itself as a political formation of the reformist centre to the service of the general interests of Spain, which has the person as the axis of its political action and social progress as one of its objective. With clear European vocation and Inspire in the values of liberty, democracy, tolerance and Christian humanism of western tradition, defends the rights of the human being and the rights and liberties that are inherent to it; it secures democracy and the state of rights as basis of the social living coexistence in liberty; it promotes, inside a market economy, the territorial solidarity, the modernization and the social cohesion as well as the equality of opportunities and the lead role of society through the participation of the citizens in the political life; it advocates for an international community founded in peace and the universal respect of the human rights.[1]
This move on Aznar to use this term is frequently accused of simple marketing of ideas,[2] use of an ambiguous term or of being just a right-wing/centre-right answer to social democrat/social liberal Third Way, trying to give a new moderate and centrist image to the rightist PP, without actually moving it to the centre (Javier Arenas described their claim to being centre as '(...) nor equidistance between right and left, nor the intermediate zone between liberalism and extreme socialism. It is an attitude of openness contrary to sectarianism'),[3] instead of an actual re-ideologisation, adopting some Christian democratic concepts (even inspiring its 1989 program on the EPP's program) without actually adopting the ideology,[4] not losing votes from other ideologies in the party.
Similar steps taken by the party include the adoption by the party, since 1996, of socialist II Republic politician Manuel Azaña's legacy.[5][6]
The term is also used elsewhere, not always in a way synonym to the PP's:
The term has been retroactively been used to refer to radicals and such centrist elements of the reform movement .[15]