Jorge Jorquera
An alliance of the left, principally made up of the Communist Party of Chile and the Humanist Party, the main Green party in Chile, managed 9.14% of the vote in the October 31 municipal elections. This is the highest left vote since the formal end of Chile's dictatorship in 1989.
The Social and Democratic Power alliance, PODEMOS (Spanish for "we can") stood 1160 candidates in 300 localities and had 90 councillors and four mayors elected. This result provides an important counter to the growing influence of the far-right linked to former dictator Augusto Pinochet, which has made ground against the increasingly discredited "centre-left" government of Ricardo Lagos.
The government coalition, the Concertacion, which includes Lagos' Party for Democracy, the Christian Democrats and the Socialist Party, managed 52.12% of the vote and the far-right Alliance for Chile, principally made up of the National Renovation and Independent Democratic Union, got 40.08%. The Alliance for Chile, led by the mayor of Santiago Joaquin Lavin, has tried to reconstruct itself as a new right-wing populist alternative, attempting to disguise its links with the Pinochet dictatorship.
The left vote represents a growing confidence among the more politically conscious workers, who are no longer willing to be satisfied with the lesser evil of the Concertacion, which has continued to spearhead neoliberalism in Chile.
The Communist Party is the major partner in PODEMOS, scoring almost two thirds of its votes. However, the Humanist Party, which got just under one third of the PODEMOS vote, represents an important addition, with its base among the lower-middle classes in the main urban centres.
PODEMOS will now be putting forward a single presidential candidate in the coming national elections and a united list for both the lower and upper houses. If PODEMOS is going to have a significant impact on Chilean politics it will have to go beyond an electoral coalition. The Communist Party has yet to prove that it can lead a united fighting force of the left, to do so it will have to break from some of its traditional schemas which put electoral work into a special category of its own and leave the work in mass movement for the Communist Party itself.
From Green Left Weekly, November 17, 2004.
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