Parties are divided or weak

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Waldo Chacón Maccarini is a political scientist at the Democracy Program at Miguel de Cervantes University.

Recent municipal and regional primaries showed low voter participation, but the election of independent candidates was significant.

It is often argued that the main problem of the Chilean political system is the excessive number of parties, which is evident at the parliamentary level and has consequences for the ability to govern. We believe that the challenges at the municipal level must be added, which explains another very important factor, which is the weakness of political parties at the local level.

The profile of past municipal elections, as well as the recent primaries, suggests that the weaknesses of the party system may be more serious than a simple diffusion of these weaknesses and be related to organizational weaknesses.

Thus, in the 2021 municipal elections, 12 agreements formed by 25 parties were registered, with a total of 880 candidates, or an average of 2.6 candidates per municipality. Of these, 311 corresponded to the agreements of the old Entente, 314 to the Chilean Vamos Agreement, and 22 to the more radical right-wing option. The Left Entente nominated 253 candidates.

These numbers suggest that the parties acted rationally and formed a large coalition. That is, since this was a single-member contest, they acted to eliminate the fragmentation that would have occurred if a large number of communities had authorized participation in the contest.

But the formation of these coalitions did not prevent 566 independent candidates from registering outside the agreement, who won 105 mayoral posts, equivalent to 30% of the total.

In itself, Of the 880 party candidates, 248 were independents, so there were 814 independents in and outside the party, while the number of party members was 632. Therefore, independents accounted for 56.3% of the total number of candidates.

As mentioned above, in 105 communes (30% of the total), the mayoral post was won by an independent candidate outside the agreement, to which must be added the elections of 58 independents registered on party lists, for a total of 163 communes governed by independent mayors, or 47% of the total.

By definition, there are fewer independents in an election than there are political parties. Because they can hardly compete with the discursive, procedural, organizational, economic and professional resources that the latter can deploy. The surge in independent candidates therefore reflects the extreme weakness of the political parties.

According to our analysis, the electoral success of independents has become a relevant feature of our political system, which explains the weakness of the parties. In the next municipal elections in October we will be able to see if this reality will increase in the forecasts.

An examination of the dynamics of municipal electoral processes may suggest that party system weaknesses may well be more serious than the pure regulation of the electoral system and that the proliferation of parties may itself be a consequence rather than a cause.