FREE ESSAY ON CHILE POLITICAL PARTIES AND ORGANIZATIONS

CHILE POLITICAL PARTIES AND ORGANIZATIONS

Taking a look at Chile's government and institutions it gives the idea that the average
person is represented. Chilean people have a history of strong political ties and many
private associations and organizations. This has been helpful in taking care that many
interests and needs are expressed within the government. Perhaps even more helpful is the
development of many different political parties, whom, for the most part represent many
of these organizations and associations in the government. In order to evaluate these
institutions a closer look must be taken at each to understand fully the amount of
organization that is in place.
In the 1990's Chile had a strong, ideological based multiparty system with a clear
division between the parties of the right, center, and left. Traditionally the parties
have national in scope penetrating into other more remote regions. Party affiliation had
been had served as the organizing concept in many leadership contests in universities and
private associations, such as labor unions and professional associations. Political
tendencies are passed from generation to generation and constitute an important part of
an individual's identity. 
By the middle of the twentieth century, each of Chile's political tendencies represented
one-third of the electorate. The left was dominated by the Socialist Party (Partido
Socialista) and the Communist Party of Chile (Partido Communista de Chile), the right by
the Liberal Party (PartidoLiberal) and the Conservative Party (Partido Conservador), and
the center by the anticlerical Radical Party (Partido Radical) which was replaced as
Chile's dominant party by the Christian Democratic Party (Partido Democrata Cristiano) in
the 1960s.
The Communist Party of Chile (PPCh) is the oldest and largest communist party in Latin
America and one of the most important in the West. Tracing it's origins to 1912, the
party was officially founded in1922 as the successor to the Socialist Workers' Party. It
achieved congressional representation shortly thereafter and played a leading role in the
development of the Chilean labor movement. Concern over the party's success at building a
strong electoral base, combined with the onset of the Cold War, led to its being outlawed
in 1948, a status it had to endure for almost a decade. However by midcentury it had
become a genuine political subculture with its own symbols and organizations and the
support of prominent artists and intellectuals. 
The PPCh's strong stand against registration of voters and participation in elections
alienated many of its own supporters and long-time militants who understood that most of
the citizens supported a peaceful return to democracy.
The dramatic failure of the PCCh's strategy seriously undermined its credibility and
contributed to the growing withdrawal from its ranks. The party was also hurt by the vast
structural changes in Chilean society, the decline of traditional manufacturing and
extractive industries and the weakening of the labor movement in particular. The collapse
of the Soviet Union and its East European allies represented the final blow. 
The Socialist Party (PS), formally organized in 1933, had its origins in the incipiant
labor movement and working-class parties of the earlier twentieth century. The Socialist
Party was far more mixed than the PCCh, drawing support from the blue-collar workers a
well as intellectuals and members of the middle-class. Throughout most of its history,
the Socialist Party suffered from a large number of factions. Resulting from rivalries
and fundamental disagreements between leaders advocating revolution and those willing to
work within the system.
The Socialist Party's greatest moment was the election of Salvador Allende to the
presidency in 1970. Allende represented the moderate wing of a party that had veered
sharply to the left. The Socialist Party's radical orientation contributed to continuous
political tension as the president and the PCCh argues for a more gradual approach to
change and the Socialists sought to press for immediate conquests for the middle class.
Prior to the 1988 election, the Socialists launched the Party for Democracy (Partido por
la Democracia--PPD) in an effort to provide a broad base of opposition to Pinochet. Led
by Lagos, an economist and former university administrator, the PPD was supposed to be an
instrumental party that would disappear after the defeat of Pinochet. But the party's
success in capturing the imagination of many Chileans led Socialist and PPD leaders to
keep the party label for the subsequent congressional and municipal elections, working
jointly with the Christian Democrats in structuring national lists of candidates.
The success of the PPD soon created a serious dilemma for the Socialist Party, which
managed to reunite its principal factions-- the relatively conservative Socialist
Party-Almeyda, the moderate Socialist Party-Nu?ez renewalists, and the left-wing Unitary
Socialists--at the Social Party congress in December 1990. Previously an instrument of
the Socialists, the PPD became a party in its own right, even though many Socialists had
dual membership. Although embracing social democratic ideals, PPD leaders appeared more
willing to press ahead on other unresolved social issues such as divorce and women's
rights, staking out a distinct position as a center-left secular force in Chilean society
capable of challenging the Christian Democrats as well as the right on a series of
critical issues. 
As the PPD grew, leaders of the Socialist Party insisted on abolishing dual membership
for fear of losing their capacity to enlarge the appeal of the Socialist Party beyond its
traditional constituency. By 1993 both parties, working together in a somewhat tense
relationship, had comparable levels of popular support in opinion.
The Christian Democratic Party (PDC), was formally established in 1957. It adopted its
present name after uniting with several other centrist groups. It elected Frei to the
Senate while capturing fourteen seats in the Chamber of Deputies. The party polled 20
percent of the vote in the presidential race in 1958, with Frei as standard-bearer. In
1964, with the support of the right, which feared the election of Allende, Frei was
elected president on a platform proclaiming a third way between Marxism and capitalism, a
form of communitarian socialism of cooperatives and self-managed worker enterprise. 
In the aftermath of the military regime, the PDC emerged as Chile's largest party, with
the support of about 35 percent of the electorate. The PDC had been divided internally by
a series of ideo;ogical, generational, and factional rivalries. The PDC, however,
retained a commitment to social justices while embracing the fre-market policies
instituted by the military government. 
Although the Aylwin administration was a coalition government, the PDC secured ten of
twenty cabinet seats. In the 1989 elections, the Christian Democrats also obtained the
largest number of congressional seats, with fourteen in the Senate and thirty-eight in
the Chamber of Deputies. In October 1991, in a major challenge to President Aylwin and
the traditional leadership of the party, Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle was elected PDC
president, placing him in a privileged position to run for president as the candidate of
the CPD. 
Another party that could be classified as centrist was the Radical Party, whose political
importance outweighed its electoral presence. The Radical Party owed its survival as a
political force to the binomial electoral law inherited from the military government and
the desire of the Christian Democrats to use the Radical Party as a foil against the
left. It was to the Christian Democrats' advantage to provide relatively more space to
the Radicals on the joint lists than to their stronger PPD partners. The Radicals
succeeded in electing two senators and five deputies in 1989 and were allotted two out of
twenty cabinet ministers, despite polls reporting that they had less than 2 percent
support nationally. It remained to be seen if, over the long run, the Radical Party could
compete with Chile's other major parties, particularly the PPD, which had moved closest
to the Radical Party's traditional position on the political spectrum. 
In 1965, following the dramatic rise of the Christian Democrats, primarily at their
expense, Chile's two traditional right-wing parties, the Liberal Party and Conservative
Party, merged into the National Party (Partido Nacional--PN). Their traditional
disagreements over issues such as the proper role of the Roman Catholic Church in society
paled by comparison with the challenge posed by the left to private property and Chile's
hierarchical social order. The new party, energized by the presidential candidacy of
Jorge Alessandri in 1970, helped the right regain some of its lost electoral ground. The
National Party won 21.1 percent of the vote in the 1973 congressional elections, the last
before the coup. 
The National Party was at the forefront of the opposition to the Allende government,
working closely with elements of the business community. National Party leaders welcomed
the coup and, unlike the Christian Democrats, were content to accept the military
authorities' injunction that parties go into recess. Until 1984 the National Party
remained failing, with most of the party leaders concerning themselves with private
pursuits or an occasional embassy post. 
With Pinochet's defeat, the National Renewal party's prestige rose considerably. In the
aftermath of the plebiscite, National Renewal worked closely with the other opposition
parties to propose far-reaching amendments to the constitution. The National Renewal
party, however, could not impose its own party president, having to concede the
presidential candidacy of the right to the UDI's Buchi. After the 1989 congressional
race, the National Renewal party emerged as the dominant party of the right, benefiting
strongly from the electoral law and electing six senators and twenty-nine deputies. Its
strength in the Senate meant that the Aylwin government had to compromise with the
National Renewal party to gain support for key legislative and constitutional measures.
The National Renewal party saw much of its support wane in the wake of party scandals
involving its most promising presidential candidates. 
While the RN drew substantial support from rural areas and traditional small businessmen,
the UDI appealed to new entrepreneurial elites and middle sectors in Chile's rapidly
growing modern sector. The UDI also made inroads in low-income neighborhoods with special
programs appealing to the poor, a legacy of the Pinochet regime's urban policy. The
assassination of UDI founder Senator Jaime Guzman Errazuriz on April 1, 1991, was a
serious blow, depriving the party of its strongest leader. 
Chileans have a remarkable facility for forming organizations and associations. In
contrast to North Americans, however, Chileans usually take a formal approach to creating
organizations. In addition to electing a president, a treasurer, a secretary, and perhaps
a few officers, they prefer to discuss and approve a statement of purpose and some
statutes. This is a ritual even for organizations that need not register legally,
obtaining what is called a juridical personality that will enable them to open bank
accounts and to buy and sell properties. Observers of Chilean society are rapidly struck
by the density of its organizational life and the relatively high degree of continuity of
its organizations and associations 
In any Chilean community of appreciable size can be found sports clubs, mothers' clubs,
neighborhood associations, parent centers linked to schools, church-related
organizations, youth groups, and cultural clubs, as well as Masonic lodges and Rotary and
Lions' clubs. Virtually all of the nation's fire fighters are volunteers, with the
exception of members of a few fire departments in the largest cities. Government
statistics greatly understate the number of community organizations because they refer
mainly to those having some contact with one or another state office. According to the
official estimate for 1991, there were about 22,000 such organizations, the main ones
being sports clubs neighborhood councils, mothers' clubs, and parent centers. Government
publications do not report membership figures for these organizations. 
Most of the important urban areas in Chile also include a broad sample of the local
chapters of a wide variety of occupational associations. These include labor unions and
federations, public employee and health worker organizations, business and employers'
associations, and professional societies of teachers, lawyers, doctors, engineers,
dentists, nurses, social workers, and other occupational groups. Membership in labor
unions, which declined significantly under the military government, has been growing
rapidly since the late 1980s, a change directly related to the transition to democracy.
Affiliation with organizations recognized as unions in labor legislation was officially
estimated in 1990 at 606,800, a 20 percent increase over 1989. That figure did not
include individuals affiliated with public employee associations (including health
workers). But these two groups usually have been closely tied to the labor movement
through the national confederations of labor. Thus, about 19 percent of a total labor
force of 4,459,600 was linked to unions or union-like associations in 1990. With the
continuing increases in union affiliations, which are especially significant in rural
areas, a conservative estimate is that the unionized population (in legal as well as de
facto organizations) stood in 1992 at between 22 percent and 24 percent of the labor
force. The most important union confederation, which encompasses the great majority of
the nation's unions and union-like organizations, is the United Labor Federation (Central
Unica de Trabajadores--CUT). CUT is the heir to a line of top labor confederations that
can be traced back through various reorganizations and name changes to at least 1936, and
perhaps to 1917. 
There are numerous business and employer associations in Chile. They collectively claim
to speak for about 540,000 proprietors of businesses of all sizes. The most important
business organization, the Business and Production Confederation, encompasses some of the
very oldest ongoing associations in Chile: the National Agricultural Association, founded
in 1838, groups the most important agricultural enterprises, includes large wholesale and
retail commercial enterprises; the National Association of Mining, founded in 1883,
affiliates the main private mining companies; the Industrial Development Association,
founded in 1883, organizes the principal manufacturing industries; the Association of
Banks and Financial Institutions, founded in 1943, is the main banking-industry group;
and the Chilean Construction Board, founded in 1951, organizes construction companies. 
Another important confederation of business groups is the Council of Production,
Transport, and Commerce. In contrast to Coproco, this organization groups primarily
medium-sized to small businesses, including many self-employed individuals who do not
hire nonfamily members on a regular basis. Its main components are the Trade Union
Confederation of Business Retailers and Small Industry of Chile, founded in 1938, and the
Confederation of Truck Owners of Chile, founded in 1953. 
Professional societies are also well established. The largest ones, aside from the
teachers' organization noted previously, are those for lawyers, physicians, and
engineers. Affiliation figures for most of the more than thirty professional societies
were unavailable, but there are at least 100,000 members in such associations aside from
teachers. If these figures are added to those for membership in business groups and
unions, it appears that about a third of the labor force is involved in occupationally
based associations. 
The organized groups of Chilean society have long played an important role in the
nation's political life. The elections in some of them--for example, in major labor
federations, among university students, or in the principal professional societies--
usually have been examined carefully for clues to the strength of the various national
political parties. Most of the nation's university and professional institute students
belong to student federations. The various associations also make their views known to
state or congressional officials when issues of policy that affect them are debated. 
Some associations traditionally have been identified with particular political parties.
This was the case, to a greater or lesser extent, with Masons, fire fighters, teachers'
federations, and the Radical Party; union confederations and the parties of the left;
employer associations and the parties of the right; the Roman Catholic Church, as well as
its related organizations with the Conservative Party; and, in recent decades, the
Christian Democratic Party. Many of the most militant party members have also been active
in social organizations. In addition, party headquarters in local communities often have
served as meeting places for all kinds of activities. The Radical clubs of small towns in
the central south are especially active, often sponsoring sports clubs as well as the
formation of fire departments. 
Social organizations did not fare well under the military government. Those that were
perceived to be linked, however loosely, to the parties of the left were subjected to
sometimes severe repressive measures. This was particularly the case with labor unions,
whose activities were suspended for more than six years. They were only permitted to
reorganize under new legislation beginning in 1979. Moreover, most associations,
including those of business groups, were hardly ever consulted on policy matters, and, in
the absence of normal democratic channels for exerting influence, they found their
opinions and petitions falling on deaf ears. Eventually, the most prominent social
organizations joined in voicing their discontent with the military government through
what was called the Assembly of Civility (Asamblea de la Civilidad), and their efforts
contributed to the defeat of President Augusto Pinochet Ugarte (1973-90) in the 1988
plebiscite. The only organizations that thrived under the military government were the
women's aid and mothers' clubs, which were supported by government largesse and headed at
the national level by Pinochet's wife, Lucia Hiriart. 
With the return to democracy, social organizations recovered the ability to pressure
Congress and the national government. The new government opted for explicit solicitation
of the opinions of important interest associations on some of the policies it was
considering. It also fostered negotiations between top labor and business leaders over
issues such as labor law reforms, minimum wage and pension levels, and overall wage
increases for public employees. These negotiations led to several national agreements
between state officials and business and labor leaders, thereby inaugurating a new form
of top-level bargaining previously unknown in Chile.