Communist shortsightedness notwithstanding, the election represents a watershed for Chilean politics, breaking through the elite bipartisanship that had successfully contained demands from below since 1990.

Of course, things could have been even better. Had the Communist Party (PCC) thrown its support behind the infant Frente Amplio (Broad Front, FA), right-wing billionaire and former president Sebastián Piñera would be facing left candidate Beatriz Sánchez in the upcoming runoff rather than soporific centrist Alejandro Guillier.

The results were momentous. For the first time in nearly fifty years, genuine left, popular forces reestablished themselves on the electoral landscape, threatening the power of the bipartisan duopoly that has dominated Chile’s post- Pinochet democracy.

The parallels to the United States are not mere coincidence. They reflect declining popular militancy as well as elite domination of politics. The analogy, however, ends there.

Some might find the results of Chile’s recent presidential and congressional elections discouraging. In many ways, the vote resembled an American election: general disgust with the political class depressed turnout to under 50 percent, the ballot stifled energy for continued mass mobilizations, and key sectors of the Left chose a lesser-evil strategy in hopes of blocking the hard right’s return to power.

The Historic

The Pinochet dictatorship established Chile’s currently disintegrating partisan and electoral institutions. And, since the return to democracy, the country’s political class has defended them, hoping to permanently forestall working-class challenges.

By the late 1950s, Chile’s electoral system was characterized by a “three-thirds” pattern. The Left (Allende’s coalitions anchored in the labor movement and the Communist and Socialist Parties), the center (the go-it-alone modernizing Christian Democrats [CD] founded in 1957), and the old, hard right (represented by oligarchic parties that fused into the National Party [NP]) roughly split the vote in three.

Unless two of these groups formed an alliance — as when, under the threat of an ascendant anticapitalist movement, the NP backed the CD in 1964 to block Salvador Allende’s victory — no political force could win even a decisive plurality. When Allende was finally elected in 1970, it was with only 36 percent of the vote. Though he came close, his inability to secure a majority opened the door for the center-right elite alliance that ushered in the devastating 1973 coup.

“Moderates” saw this as evidence of Chile’s electoral institutions’ flaws, arguing that they produce high-stakes fragmentation that inevitably creates extra-institutional conflict. They have since endorsed the quasi-winner-take-all system that Pinochet’s authoritarian constitution enshrined and that survives largely intact.

Proponents argue that, to avoid the instability of the 1960s and 1970s, Chile needed electoral rules promoting coalition building and guaranteeing voting majorities. When the return to democracy was negotiated in the late 1980s, all mainstream parties, including the refashioned Socialist Party (SP) and its offshoots, accepted the new rules. After all, the alliance Allende’s former party built with the CDs gave the socialists access to power and all the spoils of “responsible” governance.

This institutionalist fix disempowered popular forces. The first-two-past-the-post system squeezed out the Communists and cut off the campaigns they mobilized in opposition to the dictatorship and its radical free market policies. In short, the commitment to stable political institutions represented an acceptance of the inviolability of oligarchic rule.

Some observers attribute this year’s breakthrough to SP president Michelle Bachelet’s electoral reform, but they are overstating the effects of her modest changes.

In many ways, the reforms were designed to shore up centrist power. The new apportionment system formally follows the D’Hondt model, which divides congressional seats according to average vote tallies and thereby, at least in the theory, allows for more third party representation. But the legislation spread its newly created parliamentary seats in ways that could maintain high thresholds for meaningful representation. Were it not for the collapse of partisan legitimacy, the center-left and center-right coalitions might have once again dominated congress.

But these formations began losing their hold on voters well before the electoral reforms, as a resurgence of mass movements rocked the post-authoritarian party system. If anything, Bachelet’s legislation was a concession — one that didn’t go nearly far enough — to the mobilizations that carried a handful of radical student activists to Congress in 2013, including telegenic young Communist Camila Vallejo.

Along with educational and tax reforms, Bachelet’s party promised the electoral changes to the newly mobilized sectors — and the Communist Party in particular — in exchange for their support.

In 2013, the PCC emerged from the neoliberal regime’s wilderness and joined the CD and SP-led Concertación coalition. After losing to the center-right for the first time since re-democratization in 2010, this expanded formation — now minted New Majority (NM) —allowed the center-left to reclaim power.

Party oligarchs saw the Communist seal of approval as a way to legitimize a business-endorsed reform package in the eyes of the discontented sectors the PCC had helped lead. In so doing, however, it drove away an important chunk of Christian Democrats.

Communist voters and the party’s improved standing — thanks to its key role in the mass student and the revitalized miners’ movements — helped push Bachelet back into the presidency in 2013. But the maneuver fractured the old Concertación and failed to contain rising discontent.

The pro-capital reforms, along with a string of corruption scandals, provided new evidence that this “progressive” coalition, Communists and all, governed in defense of the elites rather than for the touted New Majority. The independent left thus managed to build on its small but influential parliamentary presence, extend its support in key sectors of the revitalized working class, and gain experience in local government.

Distancing themselves from the Communist endorsement of Bachelet’s agenda, congressional representatives and key Frente Amplio figures Gabriel Boric and Giorgio Jackson highlighted the reforms’ shortcomings.

The comparison between Jackson and Vallejo is telling: whereas the latter stuck steadfastly with her party’s alliance, the former publicly broke with the New Majority and insisted on the movement’s original demands, winning enormous grassroots credibility for his party and its radical allies.

From their pulpits, Jackson and Boric mentored a new generation of public school educators, who, having participated in the student mobilizations, went on to dispute the ineffectual Communist leadership of their union. Jackson’s and Boric’s consistent opposition to Bachelet’s market-friendly reforms lent political cover and programmatic coherence to an emerging mass movement against Chile’s privatized pensions. Finally, after a successful grassroots campaign, a local coalition successfully elected Izquierda Autónoma founding member and former student leader Jorge Sharp as mayor of Valparaíso, the country’s third largest city.

From these positions of power, the new independent left accomplished two aims. First, it spread its emancipatory ideals alongside a concrete social-democratic program based on a critique of Chilean democracy’s exclusionary nature. New demands arose from parliament, from student federations, from dissident labor caucuses, and from movements for the decommodification of social provisions, eventually turning into a platform that calls for full public education, universal health care and social security, more aggressive taxation of the wealthy, and sector-wide collective bargaining rights.

Second, the new left began uniting radical and progressive opposition groupings. These included age-old green and humanist opposition as well as Nueva Democracia, founded by former Communist Cristián Cuevas, who tired of his old party’s support for the neoliberal center-left. Though bringing together over a dozen still relatively precarious organizations produced its own tensions, the anti-neoliberal Frente Amplio arrived in January 2017.

The Front aimed to win a solid foothold in national elections and build an axis around which poor people’s groups and a revitalized labor movement could more formally coalesce. The results surpassed what even their most hopeful supporters expected.

Its presidential candidate, former independent radio host Beatriz Sánchez, won one-fifth of all valid votes. Her 1.34 million far exceeded what any left candidate has claimed since the return to democracy. Iconic Communist figure Gladys Marín received only 225,000 total votes in 1999; ten years later, Jorge Arrate won 433,000 votes; Sánchez more than tripled his impressive results. Most important, however, she fell only two points — just 150,000 votes — short of edging out the New Majority’s Guillier for a spot in next month’s runoff.

The FA’s success also appears in its parliamentary showing, where it won twenty seats in the lower house. To put this number in perspective, the Front has seven more representatives than the crumbling CDs and two more than Bachelet’s PS, two pillars of the post-authoritarian regime.

In a number of central, urban districts, the FA claimed the second-highest vote share. In an important middle-class Santiago district, it gained three of the eight posts up for grabs. In Valparaíso as well as in Santiago’s working-class Estación Central, it elected two members to congress.

Interestingly, the Communists only secured one seat from the latter district and none from the former, though the party had enjoyed a historical presence in both. In fact, the PCC only matched the FA’s seats in one working-class Santiago district, and even there, it took just 15.5 percent to the Front’s 23 percent.

The 20 percent cast for the Frente Amplio is simply unprecedented. While other third parties have experienced success in recent elections, this is the first time since the dictatorship that an alliance rooted in mass mobilization and calling for egalitarian reforms achieved this level of public support. Considering that Allende only won 5 percent in his first, 1952 run, this result looks more like the 1958 contest, when he won 28 percent and the working class reached the doorstep of state power.

While we have not returned to the three-thirds arrangement and the FA does not come close to the Allende front’s militancy, organization, or ideological development, one thing is inescapable: the two-headed oligarchic and neoliberal party system is in irreversible decline, and non-elite groups are once again fighting for power at the national level.