A stranger arriving in Chile during the recent presidential election campaign and traveling from the Santiago airport to the city center could be forgiven for believing there was only one candidate in the race. Every wall was painted with the name of Joaquín Lavín, the candidate of the rightist Alliance for Chile. Every ten yards another billboard projected his image or urged Chileans to join his movement “for change.” Only rarely did a sign for Socialist Ricardo Lagos, the candidate of the center-left Concertación coalition, break this publicity monopoly, and it was soon lost in the sea of Lavín propaganda. It was disorienting.
I arrived in Chile ten days before the January 16 runoff election that would decide who would be the first president of Chile in the new millennium—a former ally of Allende or a former acolyte of Pinochet? The runoff, the first in Chilean history, was necessary because neither candidate had won a majority in the first round in December. Their virtual tie—Lagos won 48% of the vote and Lavín 47.5%—shocked Chile analysts and leftists around the world. After all, Lagos was running as the candidate of the Concertación, the center-left coalition that had defeated Pinochet in 1988 and, having decisively won every election since, governed Chile successfully for a decade of peace and prosperity. Moreover, Lagos, a respected economist with a U.S. doctorate, had been the hero of the campaign to restore democracy, served as cabinet minister under two presidents, won the Concertación primary over a popular Christian Democratic senator with over 70% of the vote, and enjoyed a commanding lead in the polls only six months before. How could Lagos be reduced to a virtual draw with a Pinochet publicist from a far-right party who had never held national office?
It was this puzzle that had drawn me to Chile for the runoff election. But by the time I reached my hotel, I had begun to wonder rather how Lagos had managed to win 48% of the vote. The domination of Lavín images and messages was so total that it demoralized Lagos supporters and gave a Lavín victory a sense of inevitability that could easily detonate a bandwagon effect.
The 47.5% of the vote that Lavín won in the first round broke the historic ceiling for a rightist candidate, which was never higher than 43% in any previous election. Because it was a personal vote, not a party vote, any explanation must begin with Lavín himself.
Joaquín Lavín is a “Chicago Boy” economist by profession and a journalist by trade. He is also an active member of Opus Dei, the ultra-conservative Catholic group. In the 1980s he was a publicist for the Pinochet regime, and in the early 1990s he was a leader of the far-right Pinochetista party, the Independent Democratic Union (UDI). In 1992, Lavín was elected mayor of Las Condes, the wealthiest municipality in Chile. There, he reinvented himself as a pragmatic, can-do administrator, with a law-and-order image and an eye for public relations. As Lavín positioned himself for his run for the presidency, he adopted the anti-party and anti-politics stance that is popular with the Chilean right. He played to a similar mood in a populace disillusioned with the limitations of Chilean democracy and the self-absorbed maneuvers of its increasingly distant political leaders.
Traditionally, rightist candidates in Chile were aristocrats who looked down with a condescending paternalism on those whose votes they needed for election. At 46, Joaquín represented a new political generation, and he inaugurated a new political style. While Lagos was winning his primary contest and waiting for the defeated Christian Democrats to elect a new leadership and join his campaign, Lavín began his “Walk Through Chile,” an unorthodox campaign tour from north to south that brought him in contact with the “people” of Chile, from Mapuche Indians and copper miners to fishermen and farmers. By the time it was over, Lavín understood the major concerns of the Chilean people and had accumulated a film archive of himself with Chileans from all walks of life that would serve his campaign well.
It was a campaign that benefited from U.S. advisors, Chilean business school graduates and $50 million from Chilean businessmen in a country where campaign contributions are unregulated and there is no public campaign financing. This allowed the Lavín campaign to accumulate a war chest many times greater than Lagos, which it used to inundate Chile with Lavín’s name and slogans. Billboards beaming Lavín’s boyish smile and his wife’s good looks sprung up in cities from north to south. It also allowed Lavín to create an effective television campaign. Together it amounted to a selling of the candidate that Lagos could not match, which began in textbook style by appropriating the essence of the Lagos message—change—and turning it against him. Lavín’s slogan—”¡Viva el Cambio!” (“Long Live Change!”)—was empty, but it caught the mood of the new millennium as well as that of a people weary of a decade of Concertación rule. At bottom, it was the old cry of U.S. electoral politics: “It’s time for a change!”
But the success of the Lavín campaign also reflected the plasticity of its candidate. Lavín reinvented himself as a non-ideological, apolitical pragmatist whose sole interest was in solving the concrete problems of the people. He distanced himself from Pinochet and his own past and refused to answer questions about it, asserting that he was not interested in “politics”—a stance that reporters for Chile’s rightist-controlled media allowed him to get away with. Instead he focused on the problems people had stressed to him during his “Walk”—jobs, health care, education and crime—promising to solve all of them with a disarming directness that persuaded those listening to him that each had a personal relationship with him. In contrast to Lagos’ top-down statesman, Lavín offered a bottom-up populist. With his ability to simplify his message and repeat it like a mantra, Lavín got through to the Chilean poor, a former leftist constituency that felt abandoned by the antipopulist politics of limited government, social demobilization and political distance practiced by the Concertación for a decade.
Programatically, moreover, Lavín moved increasingly toward the center and on certain issues seemed further left than Lagos. While Lagos tried to reassure centrists worried about an “irresponsible” Socialist presidency—by implication, like that of Allende—by continuing the Concertación’s anti-populist stance, Lavín seemed willing to promise everything to everyone.
Campaigning in shirtsleeves without a tie, Lavín was also a more comfortable and modern candidate than Lagos. He spoke in 15-second soundbytes, smiled with ease and was telegenic—whereas Lagos, an academic who was best at 45-minute lectures, looked uncomfortable without a jacket and tie and seemed to come from a pre-television age. By September, Lavín had reduced Lagos’ lead in the polls to 5% and in the weeks that followed some of Lagos’ own polls showed him trailing. Lavín had transformed Lagos from an invincible presidential heir into a vulnerable candidate.
Even Lagos’ landslide primary victory became an electoral lia- bility. It weakened his Christian Democrat allies and turned off voters on the right wing of the Concertación’s largest party. It also drained his limited campaign treasury. Most of all, it generated a fatal overconfidence in the Lagos camp that delayed the start of a top-down campaign, underscoring his distance from the man-in-the-street that Lavín was courting from close up.
To be fair to Lagos, his campaign was hampered by weaknesses that were not of his making. One was the administration of Eduardo Frei, who had been elected by a margin of 33%, but had done little with this political mandate during his six years in office. Lagos, as the candidate of the Concertación and a former Frei minister, could not escape this shadow, particularly as he was dependent on—and worried about—the Christian Democratic vote. “If Lagos loses,” one Concertación leader confided to me a few days before the election, “it will be as the candidate of continuismo.” Or, as one rural voter put it to me that same week: “If the Concertación has not done what Lagos is promising in the last ten years, why should I believe that Lagos will do them during the next six?”
The Lagos campaign was also haunted by Allende’s ghost. As the first Socialist presidential candidate since Salvador Allende, Lagos could not escape traumatic memories, no matter how hard he tried. Many Chileans would not vote for him out of fear of a return to the consumer shortages and social conflicts of the Allende era, or out of fear of another military coup. What made this particularly ironic was that Lagos, who had not been a Socialist in the Allende era, had spent the intervening decades constructing himself as a new social democrat who embraced the neoliberal model and the Concertación’s centrist politics—a far cry from Allende’s “road to socialism.” It was a political journey shared by other surviving leaders and heirs of Allende’s Popular Unity coalition who had become “renovated” Socialists, and whose model was Tony Blair.
Another factor in the campaign that Lagos could not control was the economy. The Concertación had presided over the longest period of economic prosperity—high growth with low inflation—in modern Chilean history. But many newly middle class Chileans who had voted for the Concertación before and benefited from its economic policies now favored Lavín because of their new social status and consumerism. Lagos, moreover, had the misfortune of running at a time when the boom had turned to recession as a result of the impact of external crises in Asia and Brazil. Unemployment had soared to double digits for the first time in a decade and the government caught the blame. The Fifth Region, which includes Valparaíso, Chile’s chief port, had the highest unemployment in the country, and this traditionally leftist region voted decisively for Lavín in December.
This loss also reflected the anger and frustration of workers who felt they had not shared in the prosperity that their labor had created. Significantly, despite a decade of high growth with low inflation, there has been no increase in equality in Chile and real wages have remained stagnant. Other workers were angry at the inaction of the Concertación government they had voted for when their factories shut down in the face of cheap Asian imports. This inaction reflected the government’s commitment to the neoliberal model, with its noninterventionist state and reliance on the market, as well as its fear of inflation, Chile’s traditional economic disease. But it also reflected an almost fetishistic embrace of the market as regulator—and as a tool to discipline workers. Lagos was aware of popular discontent and his initial slogan—”Growth With Equality”—signaled that his administration would be different from the other Concertación governments, promising that the workers and the poor would finally get their share of the enlarged pie. It was also implicitly critical of the Frei government, whose “Growth with Equity” slogan many Chileans had come to view with cynicism.
But Lagos’ supporters in the Concertación were divided into two camps, which came to be labeled the “Self-satisfied” (autocomplacientes) and the “Self-flagellants” (autoflagelantes). During the primaries and the first round, the Self-flagellants, who were aware of this popular discontent and were convinced Lagos had to promise change, had his ear and ran his campaign. After the shocking virtual tie of the first round, for which rightly or wrongly the Self-flagellants caught the blame, they were replaced by the Self-satisfied camp, with their complacent message of Concertación accomplishments and promise of more of the same. Their motto “Chile Mucho Mejor”—”A Much Better Chile”—was as vacuous a slogan as Lavín’s “Viva el Cambio” but less compelling. While there is no evidence that their motto or message was responsible for Lagos’ narrow victory in the runoff election, the superior professionalism of their TV spots and electoral propaganda may have helped. The shift in messages, however, gave the Lagos campaign a sense of incoherence. Their efforts to imitate Lavín’s appeals to peace and unity and promises of law and order blurred the lines between the two candidates’ programs and left Chileans with a choice of who could implement this centrist vision better: an experienced but uncharismatic statesman or a young administrator with a common touch.
In the brief runoff campaign, both candidates tried to remedy their perceived weaknesses and, as a result, each seemed more like the other. Lavín appeared in tie and jacket addressing Chileans from behind a desk to project himself as an executive who was not too young and inexperienced to be president. Lagos took off his tie and jacket and tried to humanize his image with TV spots that showed him with his family or “the people.”
The runoff election campaign was also different in its absence of mass rallies and marches and in its stress on door-to-door campaigning. This was particularly true for the Concertación, which had not been in a close election campaign since the 1988 plebiscite and had forgotten how to fight one. Grassroots campaigning was made more difficult by the politics of demobilization practiced by the Concertación’s parties during the preceding decade to distance themselves from popular pressure that might jeopardize the neoliberal economic model. As a result, their grassroots organizations had atrophied and the social movements that had helped win the plebiscite had weakened. Concertación leaders found themselves making belated grassroots appeals to former supporters who felt abandoned by them.
The days leading up to the election of January 16, 2000 were filled with tension. Both sides had polls predicting a Lavín victory but with a margin of error that made the outcome too close to call. At the Lagos campaign headquarters on election night, the atmosphere remained tense until the early returns showed Lagos with a lead of some 2.5% that he maintained throughout the night, eventually winning 51.3% of the vote to Lavín’s 48.7%. Even then, the predominant emotion was relief, not joy. Ricardo Lagos had been elected as the first Socialist president of Chile since Salvador Allende in the world’s first election of the new century. But it had been a close call, one that leaders of his center-left coalition recognized as a warning they could only ignore at their peril. Lagos himself stressed that he “had heard the message of the people,” but was vague as to what that message was. Concertación leaders echoed these sentiments, but were divided on what the lessons of the election were—and on why Lagos had won the presidency in the runoff after nearly losing it in the first round of balloting.
Not surprisingly, the interpretation of the election results matched the politics of the observer, and in the absence of reliable exit polls could neither be proved or disproved. For different reasons, analysts on the right and left viewed the Lagos margin of victory as dependent on the votes of the “Communists.” The “extra-parliamentary left”—Communists, Greens and Humanists—had won nearly 4% of the vote in the first round, and two-thirds were estimated to have gone to Lagos in the runoff. Centrist Christian Democrats, on the other hand, pointed to the 2.5% increase in women voting for Lagos in the runoff election, which they attributed to the votes of centrist women attracted by Soledad Alvear, the moderate Christian Democrat Minister of Justice, whom Lagos had made his campaign manager for the runoff and who was given a high profile precisely to attract more votes from more moderate women.
What all these interpretations had in common was a view of Chilean society as composed of people with strong and stable identities and loyalties—whether of class, ideology or party. Analysts assumed that the votes that Lagos had won in the first round were assured him in the runoff and that all that had to be explained was the extra 2.5% he won in the runoff.
After more than a decade of fieldwork in Chile, my impressions—confirmed by the door-to-door campaigning I observed in January—point to a very different conclusion: that the strong and stable identifications that used to characterize Chilean society are eroding. The repression and stress on individualism during the Pinochet years meant that these values were not transmitted to younger generations, a change that the neoliberal ideology of the Concertación reinforced in the 1990s. “We used to be moved by our ideals,” one 50-year old worker explained to me, “but now we’re moved by our pocketbooks.”
As a result, in 2000 a significant portion of the Chilean electorate was up for grabs, without party loyalties, willing to vote for the candidate that appealed to them for whatever reason—and to shift from that candidate to another with equal ease. They were the swing vote that would decide the electoral outcome. There were a dozen reasons why people told me they were going to vote for or against Lavín or Lagos, and class, party or ideology were not necessarily the most powerful. They ranged from the political (such as liking or not liking the local mayor) to the trivial (such as which candidate was better looking). Religion swayed some voters (including views on abortion or divorce), while age or media image persuaded others. Many did not identify with a political party, although they told me that their parents had. They sounded more and more like the U.S. electorate—or, in the Chilean poor’s turn to a rightist neopopulist, like the electorate in other Latin American countries. Door-to-door campaigning may have persuaded enough of them to account for Lagos’ victory, but their loyalty is conditional and cannot be counted on in the future.
As the new century begins, therefore, it is difficult to know whether Lavín’s electoral breakthrough marks the end of an era or the high watermark of a rightist tide that will recede. Lagos has pledged to introduce new and younger faces into his government, in effect a transition to a younger generation of center-left leaders. But the Concertación needs more than cosmetic changes to defeat Lavín’s rightist neopopulism. It needs policies that privilege people over markets and a politics that mobilizes support at the grassroots. “If Lagos only has a normal presidency,” one top leftist warned, “Lavín will win in 2005.”
That is the real message of the Chilean elections. Yes, they ended in the election of the first Socialist president since Salvador Allende was ousted by General Pinochet in the still traumatic coup of 1973. But, if Lagos has not understood “the message of the people”—or fails to act on it—his election victory may well prove to be the Concertación’s last hurrah.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter Winn teaches Latin American History at Tufts University. He is editor of Victims of the Chilean Miracle? Workers in the Age of Pinochet, 1973-1998 (Duke University Press, forthcoming).
