The Democratic Republicans (Repubblicani Democratici, RD) were a tiny liberal political party in Italy.
The party was founded in 2004 by splinters from the Italian Republican Party (PRI), who wanted to get rid of the alliance with the centre-right House of Freedoms coalition. Its leader was Giuseppe Ossorio. At the 2005 regional elections the party presented its list only in Campania, where it gained 1.4% and Ossorio was re-elected to the Regional Council.
In 2005 the party sided with The Union and contested the 2006 general election within the lists of Antonio Di Pietro's Italy of Values (IdV). Consequently to this pact of federation, Ossorio was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in his home region Campania and sit in the IdV caucus.
On 20 September 2007, Ossorio announced that the Democratic Republicans were joining the centre-left Democratic Party (PD) alongside with fellow ex-PRI members of the European Republicans Movement (MRE). In 2010, however, the party returned into the PRI.
Famous quotes containing the words democratic and/or republicans:
“It’s like pushing marbles through a sieve. It means the sieve will never be the same again.”
—Before the 1972 Democratic Convention in Miami. As quoted in Crazy Salad, ch. 6, by Nora Ephron (1972)
“It could be clearly proved that by a practical nullification [by the South] of the Fifteenth Amendment the Republicans have for several years been deprived of a majority in both the House and Senate. The failure of the South to faithfully observe the Fifteenth Amendment is the cause of the failure of all efforts towards complete pacification. It is on this hook that the bloody shirt now hangs.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)