Chile's Elections: Change and Continuity

Abstract

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 Concertacion, 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 parliamentary elections. Second, the candidate of the Concertacion, 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, Joaquin Lavin. Finally, the unprecedentedly close results of the December 1999 race led to the first runoff election in Chilean history, with Lagos narrowly defeating Lavin by 51.3 to 48.7 percent of the vote. The climate of the 1999 campaign was characterized by a “dedramatizing” 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 twentyfirst 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 Garreton, 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 politica. Estudio sobre las democratizaciones (1995), and America Latina, un espacio cultural en un mundo globalizado (1999).