The Nationalist Republican Alliance (Spanish: Alianza Republicana Nacionalista, abbreviated ARENA) is a conservative,[6] center-right[7][8] to right-wing[10][11][12][13] political party of El Salvador.

Its founding leader was Roberto D'Aubuisson, a former major in the Salvadoran Army who was most well-known for commanding various death squads and ordering the assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero in 1980.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States described ARENA as "reflect[ing] the personality" of D'Aubuisson, and that the party's primary goals were to defeat the far-left Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and "restore El Salvador to the days before the 1979 officers' coup".

[18] The party arose in response to "the insurgency of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, FMLN, a group that united peasant farmers, unionists and intellectuals, which tried, through arms, to overthrow the dictatorship and to install a state regime inspired by the governments of revolutionary Cuba and Sandinista Nicaragua".

[citation needed] The ideology the party claims to believe in is a system of democratic and representative government, emphasizing individual rights, the family as the nucleus of society and the respect for private property.

[citation needed] On 21 July 2022, Gustavo López Davidson, the leader of ARENA from August 2019 to February 2020, committed suicide amidst an ongoing investigation against him for embezzlement and arms trafficking.

[citation needed] On 9 March 2014, Salvador Sánchez Cerén of FMLN narrowly defeated the ARENA candidate Norman Quijano by 0.2% in a run-off vote in a controversial election.