With Pinera Victory, Post-Pinochet Voting Trends are Broken

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 02 SANTIAGO 000027 SENSITIVE SIPDIS E.O. 12958: N/A TAGS: PGOV SOCI CI SUBJECT: With Pinera Victory, Post-Pinochet Voting Trends are Broken REF: 09 SANTIAGO 947; 10 SANTIAGO 50 ¶1. (SBU) Summary: Sebastian Pinera's presidential election victory on January 17 signaled the end of Chilean politics dominated by the legacy of the Pinochet regime. The right--whom many believed could not win a majority in a presidential election--ran an excellent campaign and demonstrated cross-over appeal to both Bachelet supporters and Marco Enriquez-Ominami voters. While the Frei campaign did manage to consolidate their support in the final month of the election, their efforts were too little, too late. End summary. Did the Concertacion Lose, or Did Pinera Win? -------------- -------------- ¶2. (SBU) At the Frei rally on election night, Concertacionistas with long faces analyzed their first presidential loss. Christian Democrat deputy Jorge Burgos summed up the collective mea culpa, saying, "This was more a Concertacion loss than an Alianza victory." Indeed, the Concertacion lost the presidency despite President Bachelet's record high approval ratings and Frei's history as the presidential candidate elected by the widest margin. Progressive think tank director Maria de los Angeles Fernandez believed that this day had been coming for some time. She told Poloff January 21 that the Concertacion had been worn out since the Lagos administration (2000-6),but that extremely popular president Michelle Bachelet was "like an oxygen mask" that allowed the coalition to remain in power for an additional four years. ¶3. (SBU) Nonetheless, it would be overly simplistic to attribute the outcome solely to the Concertacion's missteps. Conservative analyst and former Pinera campaign staffer Jose Miguel Izquierdo argues fairly that it is inaccurate to assert that Pinera and his team simply had the election handed to them. Izquierdo declared to poloffs January 21 that the Pinera campaign constructed a political identity for their candidate based on his openness to dialogue and his "new consensus"--the acknowledgement by the right that there is a role for the government to play in providing social services. Indeed, Pinera ran a nearly error-free campaign, uniting the previously fractious Alianza coalition even as he moved the group to the center and backed progressive-friendly causes like Bachelet's social safety net, civil unions for gay couples, and greater access for the day-after contraceptive pill. Crunching the Numbers: Frei Picked Up Steam, But Not Enough -------------- -------------- -------------- ¶4. (SBU) Despite the fact that the three progressive candidates won 56% of the December 13 first round vote (versus Pinera's 44%), Frei entered the final stretch of the campaign behind. Frei himself had received just shy of 30% of the vote and, as the embodiment of political continuity, faced an uphill battle winning over supporters of independent Marco Enriquez-Ominami's pro-change campaign (Ref A). (Note: Communist Party candidate Jorge Arrate's supporters, who accounted for only 6% of the vote, were expected to back Frei in large numbers. End Note.) A well-respected November poll asked Enriquez-Ominami supporters for whom they would vote in the runoff if their candidate was eliminated after the first round. Thirty-nine percent said they would back Frei, 20% would back Pinera, 33% would cast blank or spoilt ballots, and 8% were undecided. Yet Frei needed support from 70% of Enriquez-Ominami's voters, and all of Jorge Arrate's, in order to overcome Pinera's lead and win the election. Many observers worried that record numbers of voters would abstain or cast blank or spoilt ballots, an outcome which would favor Pinera but, more importantly, reflect that Chileans are fed up with politics in general. ¶5. (SBU) In the end, Frei did succeed in capturing many Enriquez-Ominami voters, but not enough to win the election. SANTIAGO 00000027 002 OF 002 (Pinera received 51.6% of all votes, compared to 48.4% for Frei--see Ref B.) According to calculations by the El Mercurio newspaper, in the second round 64% of Enriquez-Ominami voters backed Frei, while 36% voted for Pinera. At 13%, the percentage of registered voters who abstained (despite potential fines for failure to vote) or cast null or blank ballots (3%) was only slightly higher than in the 2005-6 presidential election. ¶6. (SBU) Comment: Chilean political observers have long asserted that Chile has a static electorate. Large numbers of Chileans registered to vote in the 1988 plebiscite on continued military rule, but relatively few have registered since then, meaning that it is largely the same group of voters that has been choosing the country's elections for the last twenty years. Conventional wisdom has been that Chilean voters don't change their political views, [with those who voted against continued military rule (56%) supporting Concertacion candidates, while those who voted for continued military rule (44%) backing Alianza.] Pinera's election--and in particular his ability to win votes from progressive candidate Enriquez-Ominami--shows that Chile's voters have moved beyond the politics of Pinochet and evaluate candidates in light of the current political situation. End Comment. URBAN