Chilean left on the rise

Although the initial results of the Chilean elections appear to show strong support for right-wing candidate Sebastian Pinera, the real news of this election is that for the first time since the coup in 1973 the Chilean Communist Party has achieved parliamentary representation.

Augusto Pinochet left Chile "tied up, and well tied up" with a constitution that established a democracy protected from the will of the people. And it is still fundamentally this legislation that governs Chile today.

The constitution enshrines a unique electoral system in which each constituency is represented by two seats, with a party needing to achieve 60 per cent of the vote to carry both seats.

If, as is most common, this percentage is not achieved, the second seat goes to the second party list with the result that the candidate with the most votes sometimes does not get a seat and that the parties of the right then become over-represented in parliament.

This system, together with a hostile media, the effects of 17 years of active repression during the dictatorship and the international impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union, have conspired to prevent the Chilean left from achieving parliamentary representation in the 19 years since Pinochet stepped down.

The left's exclusion has prevented its message from reaching many sectors of society, but many in the parties of the left and their allies now believe that this period of Chilean history is finished.

The communists have managed to get three deputies elected to Congress, including their party leader Guillermo Tellier.

Their election is the result of an alliance between the Christian left, communists and the ruling Concertacion coalition.

Such an alliance became possible because of the cracks that appeared in the Concertacion in recent years, which saw a series of right and leftwingers leave.

One of the new deputies is Jorge Arrate, the left's presidential candidate and a plain-talking former Socialist Party member and minister under Allende.

Arrate has said that these three deputies will have the same effect on Chilean politics as a drop of methylated spirits in a glass of water, changing the colour of the entire glass.

Although meths in Chile are dyed blue, Arrate is patently hoping that the three will go some way to setting out an alternative red political agenda based around several central issues.

Key among these issues will be the need for a new constitution, one preferably decided by the calling of a constituent assembly.

A fundamental aim of constitutional change is to recover full Chilean control over the copper industry, which is still the economic engine of the country.

Pinochet handed 70 per cent of the industry to foreign mining interests - a situation maintained by the Concertacion.

Another aim would be to bring about a proportional electoral system, which would end the institutionalised political exclusion of smaller political parties.

In fact, constitutional reform is a key factor in tackling most of Chile's current problems because the dictatorship's legal legacy controls education policy, the labour code, defence expenditure, mining, the environment, the electoral system - in fact virtually every significant political question facing the country today.

The need for reform has now become part of the political mainstream, with various independent candidates standing on left-wing positions, including presidential candidate Marco Enriquez Ominami, who stood on a populist left-wing platform calling for constitutional reform. He managed to take 20.13 per cent of the presidential vote.

These results, together with the electoral alliance between the Concertacion and the communists, demonstrate the emerging consensus on the need for significant and far-reaching reforms to the Chilean political system.

Whether the three deputies will in fact be able to carry the day against many of their 117 colleagues in Congress is open to question.

Apart from the rightwingers, the majority of whom dread electoral reform, there are deputies who know that if the binomial electoral system were replaced they would lose their seats - and the key to their privileged status.

So the deputies will have to struggle against political prejudice, as well as the entrenched self-interest of some of their colleagues.

Furthermore they may be overoptimistic about the amount of media coverage they will be given. The Chilean media is overwhelmingly owned by transnational media groups and by the right-wing Establishment, including its presidential candidate Pinera, who owns one of the national TV channels.

Pinera is brother of one of Pinochet's former ministers, a man who presents himself as an entrepreneur and academic untainted by associations with the dictatorship. He even says he voted against the dictator in the 1988 plebiscite which sealed the return to democracy.

This dubious claim, even if true, would not erase the fact that his fortune was made from the shady privatisation of public assets under the military regime or that he has made deals with former military men guaranteeing their impunity from human rights abuse litigation.

These issues and a series of scandals that have followed his business career remind Chileans that for all Pinera's moderate language, his election would result in the return to power of those who participated in the military regime.

Even worse for the Chilean right, the 2009 electoral campaign has been dominated by a broadly left-wing agenda, demonstrating that 17 years of dictatorship and 20 years of "social" neoliberalism have failed to create their "new man" in Chile.

Chileans remain aware that only the state can resolve the deepest problems in their society and that, as Eduardo Frei himself has said, "we need more state and less market."

The appearance of the three communist deputies in parliament will only reinforce the position of the left as a whole and could be seen as the first signs of a reshaping of Chilean politics, with the left returning to its traditional place on a political podium that has been unbalanced since the 1973 coup.