Latin America
CHILE’S ELECTIONS:
CHANGE AND CONTINUITY Manuel Antonio Garretón In December 1999, Chile held its third presidential election since the rejection of the military government of Augusto Pinochet in a 1988 plebiscite. Like the two preceding elections, which brought to power Patricio Aylwin in 1989 and Eduardo Frei in 1993, the 1999 contest was won by a representative of the Concertación, a center-left coalition of the Christian Democrats, the Socialists, the Radicals, and the Party for Democracy. It differed from these earlier elections, however, in four important ways. First, in 1999 there were not simultaneous par- liamentary elections. Second, the candidate of the Concertación, Ricardo Lagos, was not a Christian Democrat but a Socialist, who had easily defeated his Christian Democratic rival in the primaries. Third, the Rightist opposition was united for the first time behind a single candidate, Joaquín Lavín. Finally, the unprecedentedly close results of the December 1999 race led to the first runoff election in Chilean history, with Lagos narrowly defeating Lavín by 51.3 to 48.7 percent of the vote.
The climate of the 1999 campaign was characterized by a “de- dramatizing” of the elections that sharply contrasted with similar occasions in Chilean history. Some thought that the country had already entered a “new era” of democracy, markets, and globalization. They feared, however, that Chile was moving too hesitantly into the twenty- first century, and that impediments to the full realization of globalization and the market economy needed to be removed. Many of them argued that politics had to be put at the service of this process Manuel Antonio Garretón, professor of sociology at the University of Chile, is the author of several books about politics, culture, and society, including Fear at the Edge (coedited with Juan E. Corradi and Patricia Weiss Fagen, 1987), The Chilean Political Process (1989), Hacia una nueva era política. Estudio sobre las democratizaciones (1995), and América Latina, un espacio cultural en un mundo globalizado (1999). Journal of Democracy Volume 11, Number 2 April 2000 Manuel Antonio Garretón79 and thus that presidential elections were important only in a negative sense in ensuring that Chile was not “left behind.” Others believed that politics and elections no longer played a crucial role in social transformations and thus that governments should do as little as possible.
For them, politics had become pretty much irrelevant. Both these views were shared, to varying degrees, among the Right and the business community.
A different view of this question prevailed among those sectors of the Left outside the Concertación, which included the Communists and two other parties that fielded minor candidates for the presidency. They attacked what they called the “neoliberal model” adopted by the governing coalition and doubted the capacity even of the Concertación’s more leftist elements to modify this model. In their view, the elections were useful only for consolidating a sector of public opinion that would express its discontent with the Concertación’s “administration of the legacy of Pinochet.” Within the Concertación itself, two viewpoints were present. On one side were those who shared the belief that this was not the time for grand government programs or great ideas of historic significance. This was not because they had lost faith in the importance of politics but because they feared a return to the ideological polarization that had caused the collapse of Chilean democracy. The trauma of the 1960s and 1970s was still alive for them. Such fears also prompted concern about the shift from a Christian Democrat to a Socialist as the candidate of the Concertación. On the other side, leftist sectors saw an opportunity for the next Concertación government to achieve a transformation that would usher Chile into the twenty-first century while maintaining the achievements of the Aylwin and Frei governments. Overall, the pre- dominant discourse within the ranks of the Concertación combined economic continuity with sociocultural change and a call to reform the authoritarian elements of the Constitution of 1980 inherited from Pinochet.
The campaign was dominated by the style and themes of Lavín, especially in the media, which, with the exception of a couple of radio stations and one television channel, gave him their unrestricted support.
As noted above, Lavín was the candidate of an alliance that, for the first time in the postauthoritarian period, represented the whole of the Chilean Right. This alliance was led by the Independent Democratic Union party, which represented the most hard-line pro-Pinochet forces.
Nonetheless, Lavín, with the full and disciplined backing of his supporters, sought to depoliticize the election in any way he could and to abandon his former image as a man of the Right and a pinochetista.
Instead, he attacked traditional politics and talked a great deal about “change,” without making clear its content. He promised to maintain and deepen the market economy, criticizing government intervention Journal of Democracy 80 in the marketplace, but at the same time he promised to “solve people’s problems.” Lavín’s new style was important because it forced his opponent to enter the terrain of depoliticization and to compete with him in offering specific proposals and counterproposals on a variety of concrete issues such as health and education. Lagos himself, recognizing that his strength lay in the support of a solid substratum of the electorate, was reluctant to take this approach, but his campaign’s communications experts prevailed. Moreover, the political mistakes of the Frei govern- ment, combined with the effects of the Asian economic crisis, which obscured the Concertación’s real socioeconomic achievements, put Lagos in an enormously difficult position. As the representative of a new leadership within the governing coalition, he had to present himself simultaneously as the agent of continuity and change, while Lavín was able simply to call for change. The First Round Ricardo Lagos got 47.9 percent of the vote in the December 1999 election, followed closely by Lavín, with 47.5 percent. The remaining candidates combined to take 4.5 percent of the vote, led by Communist Gladys Marín with 3.2 percent, a dramatic decline from the 4.7 percent that the communist candidate had received in 1993. Among men, Lagos beat Lavín, 50.8 to 45.3 percent, but Lavín won the women’s vote, 50.9 to 44.1 percent. Turnout was very high, at 90 percent.
Lavin, the Right, and their supporters in the media interpreted the first-round results as showing that the country had changed radically:
Chile had become “modern” and its citizens were “freer” from ideological constraints. No longer would Chileans base their votes on ideological and political visions, or on their personal or collective history; candidates would henceforth be judged on the basis of their specific proposals and personal attributes. According to this interpre- tation, Chileans had put the past behind them. The electoral landscape had been wiped clean. There would be no difference between a government of the Concertación and a rightist government, except in terms of efficiency.
In my view, however, the December results show the exact opposite:
The basic patterns of electoral behavior established in the 1988 plebiscite continued to hold true. The plebiscite, in which the Right won 44 percent of the vote, and the Concertación close to 56 percent, established a bipolar electoral division within the country. This pattern carried over into the first post-Pinochet presidential election in 1989, if we add the votes of the two right-wing candidates together. In the 1993 presidential elections, the bipolar scheme was repeated: The Concertación won with almost 58 percent of the vote, crushing the two right-wing candidates, Manuel Antonio Garretón81 who got barely 30 percent of the vote between them; almost 12 percent of the vote was split among alternative candidates.
This bipolarity was maintained in the first round of the 1999 presidential elections, with over 90 percent of the electorate voting exactly as it had in the 1988 plebiscite and the first democratic presi- dential election. The small shift in the results can be explained by four factors. First, the unified support of the Right for a single candidate enabled Lavín to improve upon the performance of Pinochet in the plebiscite and of the two candidates from his bloc in 1989, recovering what had been lost in 1993 and in the 1997 parliamentary elections (where the right had won only 36 percent of the vote). Second, the vote for candidates outside of the two main blocs decreased drama- tically. Third, the decrease in the average vote for the Concertación shows that some of those who voted for the “No” in the plebiscite and later for Patricio Aylwin in 1989 or supported the Concertación in other elections now supported alternative candidates. Finally, the shift to voluntary voter registration changed the demographics of the electorate:
Younger voters now made up a smaller proportion of the electorate, while the percentage of women increased.
Thus there was no “earthquake,” no dramatic change in the Chilean electoral landscape, which remains bipolar at the presidential level and multipartisan at the congressional and municipal levels. No more than 10 percent of the electorate can be considered “floating” voters who are influenced by fleeting circumstances or by advertising or media campaigns. The voting patterns of the great majority of Chileans still continue to reflect the standard modern political divisions that clearly distinguish the Right, the Center, and the Left, with presidential elections pitting the Right against the Center-Left. The floating voters swayed by appeals not linked to these broad political and social programs are, properly speaking, less modern than the rest of the electorate. For although they may have responded to Lavín’s technologically advanced campaign, they were attracted by promises that the state would provide a solution to all their individual problems rather than by a broad historical project. The Second Round It was foreseeable, then, that there would be no substantial changes to the electoral landscape in the runoff and that Lagos would increase his lead by picking up the votes of those who had voted for minor candidates in the first round. Lavín continued with his strategy of depoliticizing the elections, downplaying the role of ideology and simply calling for “change.” His strategists’ interpretation of the first- round results led them to transform his second-place finish into a triumph. Lagos’s camp, without altering its basic approach, varied its Journal of Democracy 82 tactics slightly, introducing some changes in its advertising, softening the candidate’s confrontational ideological stance, and trying to improve his electoral performance among women. This change was accompanied by some changes in his electoral team.
In the second round, with an even higher turnout, Lagos won with 51.3 percent of the vote to Lavín’s 48.7 percent. Lagos won among men by 54.3 to 45.7 percent, while Lavín again won among women, although by a smaller margin—51.3 to 48.7 percent. In total votes, Lagos’s margin of victory increased from 30,000 to 190,000.
These results confirm that the country remains split, along the lines of the 1988 plebiscite, between the supporters of the Right and the supporters of the Concertación. After the latter had been in power for ten years, there was a gain of only four percentage points for the Right and a corresponding decline for the Concertación. As for the increase in Lagos’s total from the first round to the second, this was due neither to changes in his campaign team nor to any changes in his electoral strategy. Although these changes brought new energy to a campaign discouraged by its failure to win an absolute majority in the first round and also reinforced his support among the Christian Democrats, Lagos’s victory owes more to the fact that he stuck to his message. The 4 percent of the electorate on the Left that had voted for minor candidates in the first round switched to Lagos in the runoff because it grasped that there was a radical difference between the two candidates. Lavín’s percen- tage, on the other hand, increased slightly precisely because a certain percentage of the electorate, influenced by his media strategy, did not see any real difference between the candidates. To put it in the form of a paradox: Lavín won the electoral campaign in both rounds because he succeeded in imposing his strategy of depoliticization, while Lagos won both rounds of the elections because the deep political divisions within the Chilean electorate and the consistency of its preferences regarding the options facing the country proved decisive.
The electorate reaffirmed the Concertación’s mandate to lead the country. Lagos’s great achievement was to bring the coalition under new leadership while maintaining an adequate balance between con- tinuity and change. The failing of the Lagos campaign was its inability to repoliticize that fraction of the electorate that had altered its voting patterns; for in spite of being small, this fraction is significant enough to be a “swing vote” in two-sided elections.
Lavín won a higher percentage of the vote than any rightist candidate since 1938. This was due primarily to his success in leading the Right away from its pinochetista past. It is unclear whether the right-wing parties will be able to take on the legacy of this campaign and undergo a true democratic transformation, or whether they will simply return to their role as “guardians of the work of the military regime.” The great failing of Lavín’s campaign was that it devalued politics, dragging Manuel Antonio Garretón83 it down from the higher goal of building the good society to make it serve private ends. Prospects for the Future It has been said that in this election Chileans chose not their last government of the twentieth century but their first government of the twenty-first century. In fact, we elected both at the same time. The new government will not be able to face the problems of the future if it fails to engage the issues inherited from the past. The human rights violations under the Pinochet dictatorship must be brought before the bar of justice; without this, there can be no true reconciliation in Chile.
There must be a constitutional reform that ensures that the regime will be truly democratic. Society must regulate and control the economy, without altering its dynamics of growth. This growth must be reoriented to serve the people’s needs, while at the same time protecting the environment. There must be a reduction in inequality, which will require a process of redistribution. We must strengthen the state and its protective role, while at the same time strengthening society and increasing civic participation. We must overcome cultural banality, promote diversity, generate new opportunities for creativity, and stimulate ethical values of solidarity. These are only some of the themes that were absent from the campaign because of the obsession with churning out proposals that addressed “concrete problems.” Now that the elections are behind us, the country is coming to understand that reality is not what we see in television commercials; governing is not the same thing as advertising or marketing. The country’s real problems are much more complex that the “concrete concerns of the people” raised in the campaign, which in any case cannot be successfully addressed without solid and coherent ideological and political programs.
This, of course, raises the question of what a national project or task means today. The government of Patricio Aylwin defined the national task in terms of a “transition to democracy” and aimed at the goal of “growth with equity,” seeking to maintain a macroeconomic equilibrium while ameliorating the social effects of its economic model.
It also defined a method of negotiations that it called “democracy by consensus,” though in my view it never really succeeded in achieving a basic institutional consensus. Yet even if one may criticize its concep- tions as having been partial or insufficient, it must be recognized that it had clear goals and made progress toward achieving them. The same cannot be said for the second Concertación government, that of Eduardo Frei, despite its good economic performance until 1997. Without goals capable of mobilizing social and cultural energy, the country has been adrift, lacking a shared compass, and therefore without political direc- tion. Journal of Democracy 84 In Chile, as in other countries on the South American continent, the fin de si`ecle coincides with the exhaustion of a sociopolitical model. If there existed a project—or at least a myth—in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s, one that came to replace the populist, develop- mentalist, revolutionary, and authoritarian projects of earlier times, it was that of the “double transition to democracy and a market economy.” That project is over. Since the institutional system seems to be con- solidated, it can no longer be claimed that we are still in transition to democracy. What has actually been consolidated, however, is an incom- plete democracy, or semidemocracy. Profound reforms are needed to transform this regime into a true political democracy—that is, to translate the ethical principles of democracy into legitimate, stable, and dynamic institutions.
The other half of the myth, the model of the “neoliberal” market economy (or the “privatizing model”) has also been exhausted, both here and all over the world. Among other examples, the Asian financial crisis and the energy crisis and electricity shortage that Chile suffered in 1998 due to the lack of regulation of this privatized sector have demonstrated that the free play of the market not only disintegrates societies but also is absolutely inefficient in terms of its own goals. An alternative model is called for, one that would restore to the state (or to international cooperation) a leading role in development, establish normative regulatory frameworks for market forces, and ensure citizen control over such frameworks and forces. In other words, while acknow- ledging that politics and the economy are different and autonomous spheres, it is nonetheless necessary to introduce the ethical principles of democracy into the functioning of markets.
No one in Chile is better qualified to embark on these tasks than President Lagos and the Concertación. Thus this election may mark a turning point, offering an opportunity for a new national project that will shape the lives of at least two or three generations of Chile- ans. Yet Lagos will have to exercise his leadership very clearly and make these issues a priority, while the Concertación will have to re- found itself ideologically and programatically, keeping all that is valu- able from its past accomplishments but transcending all its limita- tions.
The current institutional arrangements enhance the veto power of the opposition. With that power, however, comes a special responsi- bility. If, as Lavín’s presidential campaign suggests, the Right is capable of abandoning the intractable positions associated with pinochetismo, it will be able to maintain the electorate it captured in the 1999 elections.
If it cannot shed its old ways, however, it will return to being a minority with no significance other than the one granted to it by a political system inherited from the dictatorship. The Right now has its best chance to demonstrate that it is a truly democratic political force.
