MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Regional left-leaning trend challenged by Chilean Sunday presidential election

The incumbent candidate must appeal to President Bachelet’s popularity

No one is going to win an outright majority in Chile’s first round presidential election on December 13 and a January 17 run-off between the conservative millionaire, Sebastian Piñera, and the former Christian Democrat President, Eduardo Frei, looks likely.

Polls have shown a steady increase in support for the young rebel Marco Enriquez Ominami. The October survey by the Centro de Estudios Publicos, CEP, gave him a 19% share of the vote against 26% for Frei and 36% for Piñera. Some polls have suggested a second place tie between Frei and MEO and most, including CEP, project that the youngster would actually do better than Frei in a run-off against Piñera.

In the last two elections CEP projections have been very accurate and MEO has failed to deal Frei a knock out punch or silence concerns about his own ability to form a viable government. And Frei has behind him the formidable electoral machinery of the Concertación, the coalition of Socialists, Christian Democrats, PPDers, and Radicals that has dominated Chilean politics since 1990. So, while it is conceivable that MEO will be in the run-off against Piñera, the safe money is still on Frei.

Frei is a weak candidate with a strong political base. He left office in 2000 with 28% approval rating, making him the only Concertación president whose popularity fell during his tenure.

He was eclipsed during the 2009 presidential debates by MEO, whose clashes with Piñera made much better television. Attempts to make a campaign gimmick of Frei’s large noise fell flat and, at 67, his claim to be “a bridge” between generations in Chilean politics is laughable.

His campaign team has been plagued by infighting and most Concertación candidates for December’s parliamentary elections have opted for campaign photos with the hugely popular outgoing president, Michelle Bachelet, rather than with the man they are supposed to be campaigning for to replace her.

By contrast, Frei’s three rivals are strong nominees handicapped by the parties behind them. Jorge Arrate, a long time Socialist who is now candidate for the Communist Party dominated Juntos Podemos Más coalition, served as minister in the first two Concertación governments. Many regard this soft-spoken 68-year-old economist as the more knowledgeable, likeable and ideologically coherent of the four contenders. But the huge majority of Chileans will never vote for the Communists and Arrate will have done well if he wins two or three percentage points more than the 5.4% garnered by Tomás Hirsch in 2005.

The re-branded, Alianza por el Cambio (Alliance for Change),consists of the Renovación Nacional (RN) party, basically a club for Chile’s landed gentry, and the Unión Democrática Independiente (UDI), a dynamic party of former Pinochet henchmen with slightly fascist undertones and close ties to Opus Dei.

Many in the UDI have never forgiven Piñera for voting against Pinochet in the 1988 plebiscite and it is only the sensation that he is the only person capable of securing the presidency for the right that keeps daggers sheathed. In fact, historic tensions between RN and UDI may still flair up and there has been fist fighting between their “rival” parliamentary campaigners in several Congressional district races.

Piñera’s challenge is to keep his reactionary backers united and on side while convincing middle ground voters that he is not one of them. So far, it has gone relatively well. Flak thrown up after Piñera met retired solders and criticized “eternal trials” for dictatorship-era abuses was swept aside. Likewise, UDI wrath after a gay couple appeared in Piñera’s campaign slots was kept, largely, private.

MEO’s greatest strength, and greatest weakness, is that he does not have a party base.

Recent successes for independent candidates throughout Latin America reflect widespread disillusionment with corruption and cronyism in political parties. Chile is not immune to this tendency, and like Ollanta Humala in Peru and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, MEO has benefited from outsider status and anti establishment discourse. Attempts are being made to mould MEO’s adherents into a party structure capable of governing and/or harnessing momentum for the future. But these have produced a schism.

Some, led by the candidate’s father, Sen. Carlos Ominami, want a progressive platform that would negotiate with the Concertación in the second round. Others, like MEO’s political manager Max Marambio, a maverick millionaire and former bodyguard of Salvador Allende, advocate a platform open to left and right. Marambio opposes negotiations with the Concertación, arguing that they will tarnish MEO’s independent credentials.

The End Game

The majority of Chileans believe that Piñera is going to win the election. Everyone I have spoken to from the Concertación has been downcast; convinced that Chile’s most successful coalition is fielding a losing candidate. If Piñera is victorious, he will be the first conservative since Jorge Alessandri in 1958 to win a presidential election in Chile.

Against her own wishes, President Michelle Bachelet has been forced to throw her weight behind Frei. The line “it is important who governs” is repeated by president and ministers.

Bachelet’s mother Ángela Jeria, who acts as a kind of First-Mum, has become a fixture of Frei’s campaign and several Ministers have been openly campaigning for him “in their spare time”. Still, despite approval rating that reached 80% in October, the President’s popularity is not rubbing off on Frei. Being accompanied by the sprite, 83- year-old Jeria has only served to underscore Frei’s own age. And a three point drop in Bachelet’s popularity in November suggests that open interventionism on behalf of an unpopular candidate may harm her reputation more than buttress his.

The government’s second tack has been to try and reach out to the Communist Party vote. The Concertación has sealed an electoral alliance with the hard-left who are unfairly excluded from parliament by Chile’s “first-two-past-the-post” electoral rules. Sunday should see one, maybe two, Communist Party candidates elected to Congress for the first time since 1973.

Bachelet has gone out of her way to woo the PC, inviting members of the Central Committee to la Moneda and making a conspicuous appearance at the funeral of Victor Jara, the legendary Communist folksinger tortured to death in1973 and now being reburied. She knows that Communist votes tipped the balance in her own second round win in 2005 and Frei needs them desperately.

So, despite vying with the Concertación for socialist “hearts”, Arrate may have a pivotal role to play in securing Frei’s election. He was, ironically, spokesman during Frei’s first government and he has called for a “minimum agreement” between the three progressives to block Piñera in a second round.

This is music to Frei’s ears but MEO scoffed at the proposal, labelling Arrate “Frei’s Campaign Manager” and attacking him for having spoken for Frei when his government demanded that Pinochet be returned from detention in the UK.

But if it is Frei who is the candidate in the run-off vote, there will be enormous pressure on MEO, not least from his own family, to back him. For the moment MEO’s line is that Frei and Piñera “are the same thing”.

If the right does pocket the presidency, Chile will be going against the regional trend. November elections in Uruguay saw José Mijica, a former leftwing guerrilla who served 14 years behind bars, elected to take the helm from his cohort Tabaré Vazquez. And Evo Morales’ victory in Bolivia last Sunday was overwhelming.

But if Piñera is victorious, it will be because the Concertación lost, rather than because he won. And a Piñera victory is still a big “if.” The electoral arithmetic in Chile does not favour the right and a lot can happen between now and January. Indeed, I have no idea what the thrust of my next article will be. Will it be a requiem to the Concertación? Will it be an attempt to find something interesting to write about a second Frei presidency? Or, will it be an account of how Chile, a country lauded for its political and economic stability and poised to join the OECD, decided to elect an untested 36-year-old maverick deputy with no party behind him?

“The future is not written,” said Adolfo Suárez, the first president of the Spanish democratic transition, “because only the people can write it.”

By Justin Vogler - Santiago Times