AFAIK there is no single generally accepted definition, what does it mean for a language to be declarative.
Some people believe that pure functional languages are declarative because of the analogy with mathematics — computations are determined purely by the statement structure, not by the ordering of the statements.
Some people (including me) have higher requirements — the declarative programming language should never tell what to do, should only define the problem without providing an algorithm to solve it. According to this definition, pure functional languages are far from declarative as much as the procedural languages. The only pure programming languages here (AFAIK) are some variants of logic programming (Answer Set Programming, Problog, ...), Constraint Programming (MiniZinc, Essence, ...), PDDL, some configuration languages (not all of them), etc. There is nothing wrong in having conditionals/loops in the declarative language, as long as they are used to define the problem, not the algorithm to solve it.
Some people believe that pure functional languages are declarative because of the analogy with mathematics — computations are determined purely by the statement structure, not by the ordering of the statements.
Some people (including me) have higher requirements — the declarative programming language should never tell what to do, should only define the problem without providing an algorithm to solve it. According to this definition, pure functional languages are far from declarative as much as the procedural languages. The only pure programming languages here (AFAIK) are some variants of logic programming (Answer Set Programming, Problog, ...), Constraint Programming (MiniZinc, Essence, ...), PDDL, some configuration languages (not all of them), etc. There is nothing wrong in having conditionals/loops in the declarative language, as long as they are used to define the problem, not the algorithm to solve it.