CHILEAN CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS 101

UNCLAS SANTIAGO 000432 SENSITIVE SIPDIS E.O. 12958: N/A TAGS: PGOV CI SUBJECT: CHILEAN CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS 101 REF: 08 Santiago 24 ¶1. (SBU) Summary: All 120 Chamber of Deputy seats and 18 of the 38 Senate seats are in play in Chile's congressional elections, which will occur in December together with the presidential election. Chile's "binomial" system, designed by the Pinochet military government, favors the right. The Concertacion's proposed pact with the Communist Party (PC),aimed at garnering a few deputy seats for the PC, would ensure PC support for presidential candidate Frei in a probable run-off election, but might push some DC voters to vote for Pinera in the first round. End Summary. Chile's Congress -------------- ¶2. (U) Chile's legislative branch of government is comprised of a Senate and a Chamber of Deputies. Thirty-eight Senators representing 19 circumscriptions (as senatorial districts are known) serve eight-year terms and 120 Deputies representing 60 districts serve four-year terms. Senators and deputies can be re-elected indefinitely and are not required to reside in the districts they represent. Congressional elections occur every four years, together with presidential elections. In this year's December elections all 120 chamber seats and 18 senate seats are in play. The remaining 20 senators will not face elections until 2014. ¶3. (U) The Concertacion coalition, made up of the Socialist Party (PD),the Party for Democracy (PPD),the Radical Social Democrat Party (PRSD),and the Christian Democrats (DC),is the governing coalition and holds a plurality of seats in both chambers, but does not maintain a working majority in either house of Congress. This is in part due to the binomial system (see para 5 and 6) and in part due to a series of defections during the last few years that have led several deputies and senators to turn independent, to establish their own movements (such as Chile Primero),or to join other parties like the Independent Regionalist Party (PRI) (reftel). The opposition Alianza coalition is made up of the center-right National Renewal Party (RN) and the conservative Independent Democratic Union (UDI). ¶4. (U) In the Chamber of Deputies, the Concertacion holds 57 seats; the Alianza 53 seats; the PRI 3 seats; and there are 7 independents. In the Senate, the Concertacion holds 17 seats; the Alianza 16 seats; and there are 5 independents or representatives of smaller parties or movements. The Binomial System -------------- �0A; ¶5. (U) Chile's 1980 constitution -- implemented during the Pinochet dictatorship -- put in place the unique "binomial" electoral system. Each coalition or political party presents a slate of two Senate candidates for each circumscription and another slate of two Chamber of Deputies candidates for each district. Voters cast ballots for one Senate candidate and one Chamber of Deputies candidate. The slate with the most votes earns one of the two seats, with the seat being awarded to the candidate on the slate with the highest number of votes. However, a single slate of candidates must outperform the second-place slate of candidates by a margin of more than two-to-one in order to gain both seats. As Chile's congressional elections have been dominated by two coalitions, in practice this has meant that the winning list must receive roughly 66 percent of the votes to gain both seats, a process known as "doubling." Due to difficulty of achieving this electoral feat, the Alianza and the Concertacion typically each win one seat per Senate circumscription and one per Chamber of Deputies district. ¶6. (U) Because the bar for winning both seats in a district is so high -- 66 percent of the votes cast -- a coalition must put up two very strong candidates in the same district if it hopes to do so. However, with this strategy the coalition runs the risk that one of those candidates may be left out in the cold (if they don't double the number of votes of their competitors). Former President Ricardo Lagos' (PPD) loss in a 1989 senate race is a famous example of the dangers of this strategy. Lagos' running mate, Christian Democrat (DC) Andres Zaldivar, won 31.3 percent of the votes, while Lagos won 30.6 percent. Because Zaldivar and Lagos together (61.9 percent) did not "double" their opponents' total (32.5 percent),the UDI's Jaime Guzman was elected to serve in the Senate with Zaldivar. Guzman had received 17.2 percent of the votes to Lagos' 30.6 percent. Gerrymandering: Still Marked by 1988 -------------- -------------- ¶7. (U) Senate circumscriptions and Chamber districts were drawn up by the military government after the 1988 plebiscite in preparation for open presidential and parliamentary elections in 1989. With plebiscite electoral results in hand, they gerrymandered the electoral districts to maximize areas that had supported the military government in the plebiscite. Chamber districts are not based on population, but in this design, which made the vote-per-seat ratio low in rural areas where Pinochet had received more support. The end result: the 20 least populated districts elect 40 deputies while the 7 most populated districts -- representing roughly the same population -- elect only 14 deputies. Many Senate circumscriptions are the same as Chile's regions (similar to the U.S., where Senate districts are states),but some regions are divided into two circumscriptions. An End to "Exclusion": The Concertacion Pact with the PC -------------- -------------- -------------- ¶8. (U) Electoral reform of the binomial system has been a Concertacion proposal since the transition to democracy, but such constitutional reform requires a super-majority, and, thanks to the binomial system, the Right effectively holds veto power over such reforms. The argument for changing the system is that it distorts voter intentions by over-representing the minority coalition and excluding third parties, such as the Communist or Humanist parties. For this reason, these smaller parties are referred to as the "Extra-Parliamentary Left" and their absence in Congress -- the Communists and the Humanists receive anywhere from five to ten percent of votes when running together -- is referred to as "exclusion." ¶9. (U) Despite the fact that the binomial system gives the Alianza a much larger congressional delegation than a single member district system would, the Concertacion appears to be comfortable with a system it already knows and has not pushed for serious reform. (Note: Press reports indicate that it will do so mid-year, though any call to change the system at this time will be more of an electoral move than a true push for reform. End note.) A short-term Concertacion remedy for this year's elections is to end the "exclusion" of smaller parties by entering into an electoral pact with the Communists. Negotiations between the Concertacion and the Communist party are still underway. COMMENT -------------- ¶10. (SBU) Chile's congressional system is not a perfect picture. Elected parliamentarians -- even in the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies -- represent, and are elected by, vastly different numbers of voters, thanks to the binomial system and chamber districts of varying size. As a result, city dwellers, Concertacion supporters, and voters for candidates or parties outside the two main coalitions are perennially underrepresented in Congress. Yet there is surprisingly little genuine impetus for serious reform -- perhaps an indication that the binomial system is one of the Pinochet vestiges still too sensitive to truly challenge. The potential Concertacion-Communist party pact would ensure Communist party support for Concertacion presidential candidate Frei in a probable runoff election. However, the move could also alienate enough DC voters to give Pinera a slight advantage in the first round. End comment. SIMONS