Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

CHILE: Left Could Force Runoff in Presidential Race

Gustavo González

SANTIAGO, Oct 25 2005 (IPS) - Alarm signals have gone off in Chile’s governing centre-left coalition, whose possibilities of winning the presidency outright in the first round of voting have been threatened – but from the left, not the right.

Although the coalition’s candidate Michelle Bachelet is slated to be this South American country’s next president, Tomás Hirsch, who is running for the presidency for an alliance of small leftist parties that have no representation in Congress, is now threatening to force a runoff election.

Lawmaker Víctor Barrueto, the president of the Party for Democracy (PPD), suggested to the leaders of the other three co-ruling parties that the coalition hold an emergency meeting to design strategies to give Bachelet’s campaign a new boost, and to improve coordination of the efforts for the legislative elections, also to be held in December.

Barrueto’s call for action came after Bachelet herself as well as other leaders of the ruling coalition and senior government officials admitted the possibility of a runoff, which had seemed unlikely until now.

The catalyst for their concern was a survey by the Feedback polling firm published by the newspaper La Tercera Saturday, which showed that Hirsch’s poll ratings had risen from 2.5 percent in August to 5.2 percent, while Bachelet’s dropped by the same proportion – 2.7 percent – to 45.7 percent.

Hirsch’s growing popularity was attributed to his strong performance in the first debate among the four presidential candidates, aired on Oct. 19 by the U.S. cable news channel CNN and Chile’s Channel 13.

“There is a before and after in this campaign, marked by the debate,” Efrén Osorio, president of the Humanist Party, told IPS.

The Humanist Party – to which Hirsch belongs – the Communist Party and several smaller leftist forces joined together in an electoral pact for the Dec. 11 elections.

Hirsch, who up to now had been virtually ignored by the press, was able to debate for the first time – on an equal footing and with broad media coverage – with Bachelet and the two candidates of the right-wing opposition alliance: businessman Sebastián Piñera of the National Renovation Party (PRN) and conservative former Santiago mayor Joaquín Lavín of the Independent Democratic Union (UDI).

“I would say Hirsch won. He gained a name for himself as a competitive player, not as merely the candidate of a small electoral alliance,” pollster Marta Lagos, the head of Latinobarómetro, a Chilean-based survey firm, told the daily La Nación.

In the La Tercera-Feedback poll, Piñera’s 19.4 percent ratings put him ahead of Lavín, whose support stood at 18.4 percent, although due to the margin of error the two are considered to be in a tie.

A projection based on the results of the survey indicates that Bachelet would win in the first round of voting with 51.5 percent of the vote, lower than the 55.2 percent she was projected to take back in August.

The danger now is that Hirsch’s popularity could continue to grow.

In the projections for the second round, the poll indicates Bachelet would defeat Lavín by a margin of 58.6 to 31.7 percent, and would beat Piñera by a margin of 53.1 to 37.8 percent.

The need for a runoff election if no single candidate wins over half of the vote was incorporated in the 1980 constitution approved under the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

But “ballotage” was used for the first time in January 2000, when current President Ricardo Lagos beat out Lavín by 51.32 against 48.68 percent of the vote, after winning the first round in December 1999 by a tiny margin of 47.95 to 47.51 percent.

The 3.19 percent votes garnered in the first round by Communist leader Gladys Marín and the 0.51 percent taken by Hirsch himself in 1999 helped Lagos triumph in the 2000 runoff.

The ministers of the interior and the secretariat-general of the government, Francisco Vidal and Osvaldo Puccio, pointed out on Monday that the runoff election or ballotage falls within the rules of the democratic game and enables governments to rule with a strong mandate.

“President Lagos won in the second round, and he has had a great administration,” said Puccio.

In 1999, Lavín ran as the sole candidate for the right-wing Alliance for Chile, made up of the UDI and PRN. But this time around, the PRN has fielded its own candidate, Piñera.

“I have my own polls, and in them I am in second place,” said Lavín after the Publication of the La Tercera-Feedback survey. Piñera, meanwhile, who emerged as a candidate in May, said the poll confirmed that his popularity was growing and that he would be the one to face off with Bachelet in the second round of voting on Jan. 10.

“The electoral climate is becoming more and more sensitised as the elections approach, and perhaps too much significance is being read into the latest poll, the first to be published since the televised debate,” political analyst Adolfo Rodríguez commented to IPS.

The analyst pointed out that the survey, carried out Oct. 15-22 in 800 households, only comprised the Santiago metropolitan region, which is home to 37 percent of the total 8.2 million voters in this country of 15.5 million.

“It would be important to see the results of nationwide surveys before venturing a judgement,” Rodríguez added.

The governing Coalition for Democracy feels the need to make it completely clear that even if the Socialist Party’s Bachelet is forced to go to a runoff, there is not the slightest chance that she would be defeated by either Piñera or Lavín.

The coalition, which has governed Chile since the Pinochet regime came to an end in March 1990, is made up of the Christian Democratic Party, the Socialist Party, the Party for Democracy and the Radical Social Democratic Party.

Legislator Camilo Escalona, the head of the Socialist Party, said he saw no reason for Bachelet to lose votes to Hirsch.

Joaquín Arduengo, a Humanist Party candidate for the Senate, told IPS Tuesday that Escalona’s comments were “a vain attempt to weaken the candidacy of Tomás Hirsch,” whose support “will continue to grow from here to the elections.”

“Bachelet, on the other hand, will continue to go downhill in the polls, since the government has no real intention of carrying out the changes that Chile wants and needs,” Arduengo predicted.

Hirsch, who rejected Lavín’s praise for his performance in the debate, said he was not interested in forcing a runoff, but in strengthening the left, which is why he hoped for “two-digit” support in the December elections.

Political analysts agree that it is now up to Bachelet and the ruling coalition to take the initiative, pointing out that within the coalition there are different expectations as to the relations of the various parties with the candidate who looks set to become Chile’s first female president.

“There are certain party ‘barons’ who would prefer for Bachelet to win a more limited mandate in January (2006) than a landslide of votes in December, which would make her immune to control by party leaders,” political analyst Rafael Fuentealba wrote in La Nación.