The party was founded in 1985 as the Youth Party ("Partido da Juventude", PJ) by Daniel Tourinho, a Brazilian lawyer. In 1989 the party was renamed National Reconstruction Party. Fernando Collor de Mello represented the party in the 1989 Brazilian presidential election, the country's first direct election since the 1964 Brazilian coup d'état, which followed a redemocratization process started in the 1980s. Collor was elected president and took office in 1990. The party carried out a platform of encouraging free trade, opening Brazil's market to imports, privatizing state-run companies, and attempting to reduce Brazil's rampant hyperinflation by way of the Plano Collor ("Collor Plan"), which significantly reduced inflation rates in 1991, but was followed by a renewed and persistent, though smaller uptick in 1992. Inflation continued rising until the 1994 Plano Real.