The recent electoral success of the Chilean left gives new weight to the anniversary of Allende’s fall from power at the hands of a vicious US-backed coup. How should this new generation, many of whom lived through neither Allende’s Popular Unity government nor Pinochet’s dictatorship, wrestle with the promises and perils of state power? What lessons should a project like Frente Amplio take from the Popular Unity experience — and what is different today? Though the answers vary among the new Chilean left, exploring them is crucial for ensuring the continuance of Allende’s democratic revolution.

Today, Revolución Democrática has become one of the largest parties in Chile. Together with several other political and social actors, it has formed an unexpectedly successful political coalition, the Frente Amplio (Broad Front). This coalition has managed to shake the political landscape of the country, defying several aspects of the establishment consensus and achieving important success in the 2017 elections.

In 2014, a new party in Chile called Revolución Democrática inaugurated its central office. One of the first things they did was decorate the walls with a mural. The quote chosen for this mural was from a speech by the iconic Chilean president Salvador Allende: “Since my youth I have fought against prejudice and obsolete political systems. As fate would have it, I have led this Democratic Revolution in Chile.”

Why Allende Fell

Allende’s vision of a Chilean route to socialism diverged from the then-popular Cuban model of guerrilla insurgency. It attempted instead to bring forth the new economic and social order without breaking from liberal democracy, and while complying with an entrenched legal, judicial, and multiparty system. His government was viewed with skepticism by the Soviet Union, who feared its success could set an example for countries under its own influence to push for more civil liberties. It was also seen with preoccupation by the United States, who saw in it the potential of “socialist contagion” to other countries in the region.

In retrospect, Allende’s government can be regarded as an ultimate test of the limits of any democratic socialist electoral endeavor. Much can be learned from both its initial success and its latter demise.

Nearly five decades after Allende’s Popular Unity government, he remains a universally central figure for the Chilean left. However, the Left diverges in its interpretations of Allende’s fall, between a social democratic perspective and a more radical or traditionally Marxist one.

Social democratic theorists Adam Przeworski and Gøsta Esping-Andersen analyzed the limits of an electoral route to socialism. Przeworski’s view, with Allende’s government as his central case study, is pessimistic. According to him, as socialist parties, especially in Western Europe, decided to compete for power through elections, they were faced with insurmountable problems. One of them was that, since in no capitalist society had the proletariat managed to grow to an absolute majority (and an important segment of the working class would not align itself with the socialists), socialist parties were forced to choose between remaining loyal to their class purism or expanding their appeal beyond a narrow definition of the working class. Thus, as social democratic parties abandoned their identity as the “party of the working class” and became the party of “the masses, the people, the nation, the poor, or simply the citizens,” they also ended up renouncing their essence of class struggle and class identity.

Even when socialist or social democratic parties managed to achieve power through elections, Przeworski continues, they were doomed to face the opposition of capital and the ruling classes. As soon as any reform implemented endangered capitalist accumulation, capitalists could successfully boycott the national economy through a “capital strike” or, as the Chilean example portrayed, by bypassing democracy altogether.

Esping-Andersen shared a similarly gloomy diagnostic on the prospects of achieving socialism through elections. He views the limits of electoral socialism as a call to realistic compromise with the middle classes and capitalist elites. Socialism, as originally envisioned, was not possible through a democratic road. The Left must compromise its programmatic stances, at least in the short run, until the conditions for major changes emerge.

In this interpretation, Allende’s mistake was his uncompromising positions. Allende’s project was doomed from the start, because he attempted to push the liberal state too much, too quickly. In the Chilean context, this interpretation was often translated into Allende’s lack of dialogue with the political center, which was dominated by the Christian Democrats. That party, which was especially strong among the peasantry, initially provided the necessary parliamentary votes to ratify Allende’s government (necessary because Allende had achieved less the 50 percent of the votes) but subsequently supported the coup (with a few noticeable exceptions).

After seventeen years of dictatorship following the coup, the above interpretation pushed Allende’s Socialist Party to conclude that only an alliance with the political center would allow them to return to power. This center-left coalition negotiated an institutional transition with the dictatorship and led the country for the twenty years that followed the regime, carefully advancing only in those aspects that were deemed feasible because they ensured a consensus with the right-wing opposition.

There are several reasons for this Socialist-Christian Democrat convergence and their support for a “democracy of consensus” with the right-wing opposition. A central one was a traumatic acceptance, thanks to the ferocious reaction embodied in Pinochet’s dictatorship, of the limits of what was possible under the democratic path to socialism.

Meanwhile, Ralph Miliband summarized what became the main interpretation of Allende’s fall in more radical sections of the Left. According to this interpretation, Allende´s mistake was his obtuse intent to follow the formal and institutional path of the liberal state, even as conditions changed dramatically:

Allende was not a revolutionary who was also a parliamentary politician. He was a parliamentary politician who, remarkably enough, had genuine revolutionary tendencies. But these tendencies could not overcome a political style which was not suitable to the purposes he wanted to achieve.

Specifically, Miliband criticized Allende’s unwillingness to encourage parallel popular forces that could push forth radical changes. As the president’s ruling-class opponents started to feel their interests being seriously threatened, and as they were losing faith in regaining power through elections (especially after the legislative elections of 1973), class war became inevitable. In those circumstances, relying on the institutional forces of liberal democracy to contain the ruling classes was, at best, extremely naive.

Miliband points to communist leader Luis Corvalán, and his support for a strategy of appeasing the armed forces, as an example of such obtuseness and its failure. Corvalán was one of the main supporters of the democratic, gradual, and institutional path to socialism. When Allende’s government was overthrown, he was imprisoned and could only be released through a prisoners’ swap negotiated by the Soviet Union. After his release, Corvalán and the Chilean Communist Party became outspoken supporters of the insurgent route. The Communist Party unsuccessfully attempted to forcibly remove Pinochet from power and refused to join their former socialist allies in the new center-left coalition as they negotiated with Pinochet’s regime the institutional transition back to democracy.

Over the two decades following Pinochet’s dictatorship, the Chilean left was defined by one consensus: Allende’s government, however heroic, had been doomed from the start. For some, his fate was sealed by his lack of compromise with the political center. For others, his downfall was brought by his lack of support for popular uprising and insurgency.

So, was Allende’s project doomed from the start? And, if so, was it because of its being too radical and unwilling to dialogue with the political center, or was it because of its moderation and refusal to create a parallel insurgent force?

On one hand, those who emphasize the lack of dialogue with the center overestimate the extent to which this was under Allende’s control. Allende tried to reach out to the Christian Democrats on several occasions, but they had no ideological or electoral interest in reaching an agreement and helping the leftist government to succeed.

On the other hand, those who emphasize Allende’s lack of interest in forming a parallel popular force and, occasionally, his active role in supressing such organization, may be overestimating the real strength that such an uprising could have had against the formally trained army — and its allies in the United States government. It is much more likely that such a civil war would have ended with huge bloodshed and the same authoritarian outcome.

Perhaps more important, both interpretations lack a historical contextualization of Allende’s political coalition and project. Allende’s Popular Unity was not the first coalition of socialists and communists to come into power through elections. A few years before, there were three different Chilean presidents from the Popular Front coalition. This coalition included, at its origins, both socialists and communists, and was led by the centrist Radical Party.

These Popular Front governments are credited with having founded several of the Chilean state’s more progressive institutions. For instance, its first president, Pedro Aguirre Cerda, is known as “the father of Chilean public education”; and the Corporación de Fomento de la Producción (CORFO), which instituted and expanded state ownership in strategic areas, was founded by a Popular Front government. A few years after the Popular Front, the Christian Democrat government that preceded Allende played a major role in increasing unionization, promoting social organization, and undertaking a major agrarian reform. In some ways, Popular Unity’s program was the radical continuation of a long process of social and political democratization initiated by the 1925 constitution and developed over the twentieth century.

An important political difference between Allende’s government and those of the Popular Front was their relationship with the center. Particularly, the Christian Democrats, unlike the Radicals, represented an ideological center that saw itself as enacting a different position from both the right and left. In practice, this meant that in Allende’s time, the Left was presented with two choices: creating a coalition with this ideological center that would sacrifice some of the socialist character of their project, or challenging the center, as they did.