[1] After the re-democratization of Brazil, an article in the new Constitution determined the holding of a referendum for voters to decide if the country should remain a republic or become a monarchy again, and if the system of government should be presidential or parliamentary.

At the time, the country had been a republic for 104 years since the coup d'état that overthrew the monarchy on 15 November 1889 and, apart from a brief parliamentarian experience between 1961 and 1963[2] (also defeated in a referendum), the system had been presidential.

[1] A monarchist since a child, and son of Antônio Sílvio Cunha Bueno, one of SDP's founders in São Paulo, he decided to propose to his fellow deputies the hold of a referendum to give the people the possibility to choose the form of government they preferred.

[1] Bueno managed to convince the Constituent Assembly that, since the Republic had been proclaimed in Brazil by means of a military coup d'état in 1889, without any say of the people, the Brazilian Nation should be given the chance of deciding the form of Government of their choice.

Given that, when the Constitution was approved in 1988, the country was in a process of returning to democracy after a long military regime, the idea of giving the people the opportunity to decide their form of Government (either choosing the restoration of the Monarchy or opting for the Republic, an option that would give popular legitimacy to a form of Government that had been first imposed in a military coup) gained wide support in the Constituent Assembly.