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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Chile
Index
The Christian Democratic Party (Partido Demócrata
Cristiano--
PDC), formally established in 1957, traces its origins to
the
1930s, when the youth wing of the Conservative Party, the
Conservative Falange (Falange Conservativa), heavily
influenced by
the progressive social doctrines of the Roman Catholic
Church and
the works of French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain,
broke
off to form the National Falange in 1938. Although the PDC
remained
small for many years, it came to prominence in the 1940s,
when
party leader Eduardo Frei Montalva became minister of
public works.
The party's fortunes improved gradually improved as the
leadership
of the Roman Catholic Church shifted from an embrace of
the right
toward a more progressive line that paralleled the
reformist bent
of the Falangist leadership. The PDC came into its own in
1957,
when it adopted its present name after uniting with
several other
centrist groups. It elected Frei to the Senate while
capturing
fourteen seats in the Chamber of Deputies. The party
polled 20
percent of the vote in the presidential race in 1958, with
Frei as
standard-bearer. In 1964, with the support of the right,
which
feared the election of Allende, Frei was elected president
on a
platform proclaiming a "third way" between Marxism and
capitalism,
a form of communitarian socialism of cooperatives and
self-managed
worker enterprises.
Although the PDC grew significantly during Frei's
presidency
and succeeded in obtaining the largest vote of any single
party in
contemporary Chilean history in the 1965 congressional
race, the
Christian Democrats were not able to overcome the
tripartite
division of Chilean politics. Its candidate in the 1970
election,
Radomiro Tomic Romero, came in third with 27.8 percent of
the total
vote.
The PDC soon broke with Allende, rejecting measures
issued by
decree without legislative support and shifting to an
alliance with
the parties of the right. Although the PDC leadership,
which by
1973 had returned to the more conservative orientation,
welcomed
the coup as "inevitable," a significant minority condemned
it.
Within months, the party began to distance itself from the
military
government over the new regime's strongly antipolitical
cast, its
human rights violations, and its clear intention of
remaining in
power indefinitely. By 1980 the PDC was playing a
leadership role
in opposition to the military regime.
In the aftermath of the military regime, the PDC
emerged as
Chile's largest party, with the support of about 35
percent of the
electorate. The PDC had been divided internally by a
series of
ideological, generational, and factional rivalries. A
large number
of party followers identified themselves as center-left,
while many
viewed themselves as center-right. The PDC retained a
commitment to
social justice issues while embracing the free-market
policies
instituted by the military government. However, the
communitarian
ideology of the past receded in importance, and the
Christian
Democrats remained reluctant to take issue with the Roman
Catholic
Church's stands on divorce and abortion.
Although the Aylwin administration was a coalition
government,
the PDC secured ten of twenty cabinet seats. In the 1989
elections,
the Christian Democrats also obtained the largest number
of
congressional seats, with fourteen in the Senate and
thirty-eight
in the Chamber of Deputies. In October 1991, in a major
challenge
to President Aylwin and the traditional leadership of the
party,
Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle was elected PDC president, placing
him in
a privileged position to run for president as the
candidate of the
CPD.
Another party that could be classified as centrist was
the
Radical Party, whose political importance outweighed its
electoral
presence. The Radical Party owed its survival as a
political force
to the binomial electoral law inherited from the military
government and the desire of the Christian Democrats to
use the
Radical Party as a foil against the left. It was to the
Christian
Democrats' advantage to provide relatively more space to
the
Radicals on the joint lists than to their stronger PPD
partners.
The Radicals succeeded in electing two senators and five
deputies
in 1989 and were allotted two out of twenty cabinet
ministers,
despite polls reporting that they had less than 2 percent
support
nationally. It remained to be seen if, over the long run,
the
Radical Party could compete with Chile's other major
parties,
particularly the PPD, which had moved closest to the
Radical
Party's traditional position on the political spectrum.
Data as of March 1994
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