|
 |
 |
|
In the last 40 years Chile has suffered four major earthquakes that left cities and towns heavily damaged and caused great loss of life. A new earthquake last Sunday, this time political, left the governing coalition badly damaged and ended many individual aspirations.
The center-left coalition that has governed Chile since Augusto Pinochet's rule ended in 1990 narrowly won parliamentary elections as the government of president Ricardo Lagos obtained around 47 percent of votes against 44 percent for the right-wing opposition, a victory earned in the face of high unemployment and economic slowdown. However, the government lost ground in both the lower house and the senate and may now have to make concessions to the right to push legislation through Congress.
But this is not the major part of the story. The shocking news is that the centrist Christian Democratic Party-the senior member of the governing coalition, which includes the Socialist Party and other smaller parties-lost to the right-wing Independent Democratic Union (UDI) its traditional position as Chile's majority party.
Two years into his six-year mandate, Lagos, 63, heads one of the most stable democracies in Latin America. He is Chile's first socialist president since Salvador Allende, who died in the La Moneda presidential palace when forces loyal to Pinochet stormed it in the 1973 coup.
The UDI, whose standard-bearer is Santiago Mayor Joaquín Lavin-who lost the
January 2000 presidential election to Lagos by only two percentage points-,
became the country's biggest single party with some 26 percent of the vote.
At that time we said here that "Lagos was able to overcome the image Lavin had
helped shape that the socialist candidate was a man of old and tired ideas, but
in a certain sense it was Lavin who helped Lagos, by pressing him to tone down
ideological debate and focus on Chile's deep social and economic problems." And
we noted that "Lagos was forced to match Lavin's proposals to create hundreds of
thousands of jobs" and would "have to meet those promises when he takes office
March 11."
He didn't. Slower economic growth rates this year and unemployment of more than 9 percent have cast a shadow over the Concertación para la Democracia coalition of socialists and Christian democrats.
Lavin, a former technocrat in Pinochet's government, called for the president and parliament to work together. "The people are saying, 'End political fights, end bickering, let's get together and do what we have to do: overcome unemployment and crime,' " he told supporters.
However, Senate president Andrés Zaldivar, of the governing coalition, said that, even though "there might be good intentions of collaboration by the opposition, consensus will be more difficult, not because of the larger number of the UDI which represent a harder right, but because the debate will be centered on the presidency. I don't see Joaquín Lavin in Santiago's city hall and the UDI working as if there were no presidential election in four more years."
An he added: "We will have to see what will be really the conduct of the UDI, which is going to lead and how Renovación Nacional will act," referring to another more moderate right-wing party which was associated with UDI in the opposition Alliance for Chile, which garnered 44 percent of the vote.
With both sides quite close in their appeal to voters-both emphasized the need of lowering unemployment and provide better health care and education, which hinges on improving the economy-it could be expected that Lagos would lead a great national accord to emerge from the crisis. But, were he to take this route, it is possible that, paradoxically, he could have greater support from the opposition than from his own Socialist Party.
As for the Christian Democrats, their chance to regain the majority position they lost depends on how much they can separate themselves from their socialist associates, because the reading Chilean analysts make of the Sunday election is that independent catholic voters -a definite bloc in Chile- abandoned one catholic-based party they saw as leaning to much to the left for the other, the UDI, also catholic-based but much more to the right.
Claudio Campuzano (claudio-campuzano@hotmail.com) is U.S, correspondent for the Latin American newsweekly Tiempos del Mundo and editorial page editor of the New York daily Noticias del Mundo. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com