First Page
18
Abstract
The municipal elections of Chile were held on April 2,1967. On April 3, in Santiago, spokesmen from the national committees of the five major parties --the Christian Democrats, the Radicals, the Communists, the Nationalists, and the Socialists--all proclaimed that the results showed that their political aggregation had been victorious on the previous day. The debate concerning who had won the election raged for several weeks in the press, in Congress and in spirited social conversation. The Christian Democrats argued that although their percentage of the national vote dropped from forty-two per cent to thirty-five per cent, they had increased their strength in the municipal councils by over two hundred representatives to six hundred and forty-nine councilmen, a new record for any single political party in all of Chile's history. The leftist coalition of FRAP (Communist-Socialist) boasted that they reflected the coming wave in Chilean politics by gathering nearly twenty-eight per cent of the total vote, an increase of six per cent from 1965. The Radicals announced with relief that they had retained second place in party percentages (sixteen per cent), and that their vote represented a vehement renunciation of the whole Christian Democratic movement. The National Party, perhaps the most surprised by its strong showing (fourteen per cent), predicted that the "Right" was not a dead letter in Chile, and that a new awakening was imminent.
Recommended Citation
Peter S. Cleaves and Eugene V. Matta,
Expression of Democracy: Local Elections in Petorca, Chile,
1 Vanderbilt Law Review
18
(1967)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/vjtl/vol1/iss1/11