Brazil & Southern Cone - September 2011 (ISSN 1741-4431)

The four months of protests by school and university students in Chile are finally starting to reshape the political arrangements which have been in place for the past 20 years. The surprisingly strong performance of former President Michelle Bachelet in the Cerc opinion poll (see previous article) shows that she may be a viable presidential candidate in 2014. This is the first good news for the Concertación, which propelled Bachelet to the presidency in 2006, since its defeat in 2010.

Bachelet’s respectable showing is probably not decisive enough to change the assumption among political commentators that the neat parcelling-up of political power between the Left and the Right in Chile will not last. The first evidence that this system could not last came in the 2009 presidential election campaign when Marco Enríquez Ominami, a dissident socialist deputy, challenged Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, a former president, for the right to take-on the right-wing candidate, Sebastián Piñera in the decisive second round of the presidential elections.

Enríquez Ominami failed to get through to the second round, but his challenge forced the four parties of the Concertación, the left-of-centre alliance which ruled Chile from 1990 to 2010, to rethink the Concertación’s role. Given the imploding opinion poll ratings of the President Piñera, how the Concertación decides to reform itself will have major implications.

The Concertación is not the only organisation mulling over political reform. On 6 September President Piñera sent a bill to congress that would allow voters to choose between a range of candidates in primary elections. Such a change would weaken the political parties’ grip on power. One reason why Enríquez Ominami did so well in 2009 was that Frei was virtually imposed as the Concertación’s candidate, without a proper primary election, as part of a political deal between the parties in the Concertación.

At a 12 September summit meeting, the leaders of the four parties that make up the Concertación set themselves a deadline of 5 October to reform the alliance. Ignacio Walker, the Partido Demócrata Cristiano (PDC) senator who serves as national spokesman for the Concertación, said that all four parties agree that the Concertación is no longer working, and that voters do not view it as the natural government-in-waiting. The Concertación has been performing even worse in opinion polls than President Piñera and his right-of-centre government. Indeed in the latest Cerc poll on 27 September support for the Concertación was down to 11% and the rejection rate was 43%.

The PDC sits at the centre of the Chilean political spectrum and is not keen on the Concertacíon shifting to the Left which is, effectively, where the second biggest party in the Concertación, the Partido por la Democracía (PPD), wants to take the Concertación. Essentially, the PPD wants to bring the Partido Comunista de Chile into the Concertación.

One reason for this is purely tactical. The communists have been prominent in the student demonstrations, which have widespread public support. The most photogenic of the student leaders is Vallejo is a prominent communist.

The PPD’s president, Carolina Tohá, wants to rebrand the Concertación as a broader based Convergencia Opositora. The implication of such a name is that as the presidential elections in 2013/4 draw nearer, each of the political parties in the Convergencia would become freer on policy issues.