Frente Popular (Chile)

The Frente Popular in Chile ( Frente ) was a Popular Front government in Chile that ruled from 1938 to 1941. The alliance of the left-liberal Partido Radical ( Radical Party ) and the two labor parties Partido Socialista ( Socialist Party ) and Partido Comunista ( Communist Party ) was founded in 1936 and formally broke up in 1941. However, radical presidents continued to rule with the support of the left-wing parties until 1952. Decades later, the left-wing alliance Unidad Popular was formed , which is also occasionally referred to as the Popular Front. However, the 1936 Frente and the UP differ significantly from one another.

prehistory

Alessandri government

In the early 1930s, Chile was hit harder by the global economic crisis . The immediate consequence was that the dictator Carlos Ibañez del Campo was chased out of office. This was followed by two years of political chaos. Only the election of Arturo Alessandri in 1932 could the country stabilize. Alessandri, who headed a progressive-populist government from 1920 to 1924, developed more and more repressive tendencies during his second term in office. The center party Partido Radical (PR) was a member of Alessandri's governing coalition, but increasingly distanced itself from the president. The main points of the conflict were:

the increasing repression against leftists and workers, including by the government-sponsored paramilitary Milicias Republicanas
the liberal economic policy of Finance Minister Gustavo Ross
a new divorce law and other religious conflicts

When, after the Socialists' electoral successes, a left turn also seemed opportune for PR, the left wing of the party around Gabriel González Videla increasingly gained the upper hand over skeptics such as Pedro Aguirre Cerda and Domingo Durán . After a railroad strike was put down in February 1936, the PR left the government and in the same year the Frente Popular was founded.

National Socialist Movements

At the beginning of the 1930s National Socialist and Fascist movements were founded in Chile , including the National Socialist Movement of Chile ( Movimiento Nacional-Socialista de Chile ) with its "Führer" ( jefe ) Jorge González von Marées and in the south of the country foreign branches of the German NSDAP . These groups always remained splinter parties , but given the rise of Adolf Hitler and the looming Second World War , they also played a dominant role in the political debate in Chile.

Popular Front policy of the Comintern

In Europe, after the First World War, the rise of fascist movements began. In 1922, Benito Mussolini took power in Rome . In 1933 Hitler came to power in Berlin. Finally, in 1936, the first open war between the fascists around Francisco Franco and the Republicans began in Spain . This development caused the leadership of the Communist International to implement a change of strategy, which marked an ideological U-turn. So far, the Comintern, dominated by the CPSU , had stipulated a strict demarcation for all communist parties worldwide from all “ bourgeois ” parties as well as from other left-wing parties. This went so far that in the context of social fascism , the Social Democracy was seen as the main enemy. The Popular Front strategy announced in 1934 turns this on its head. In the fight against fascism, the communists should now forge broad alliances with socialist and progressive bourgeois parties worldwide . The most famous popular fronts were founded in 1935 as the Front populaire under Léon Blum in France and the following year as the Frente Popular in Spain. In total there were at least 17 popular fronts worldwide in the 1930s. The German-Soviet non-aggression pact ended the Comintern's popular front policy in 1939.

The 1936–41 frontier

Pedro Aguirre Cerda

founding

The Frente Popular in Chile was founded on April 2, 1936 . The immediate cause was a by-election for the Senator of the Región del Bío-Bío (which immediately lost the Frente). The election of a presidential candidate for the 1938 election presented the alliance with its first tough test. The PS wanted to push through its party leader, Marmaduque Grove , while the PR insisted on a radical, the latter being supported by the Communist Party. After eleven unsuccessful votes without a 2/3 majority for one of the candidates, Grove's task cleared the way for the radical Pedro Aguirre Cerda .

In parallel with the alliance of the center-left parties, the most important trade unions also formed the Confederación de Trabajadores de Chile (CTCH) in 1936 . The CTCH had four predecessor unions, three of which were affiliated with the Frente parties.

Federación de Obreros de Chile (FOCH), communist
Confederación General de Trabajadores (CGT), anarchist
Confederación Nacional Sindical de Chile, socialist
Asociación de Empleados de Chile, radical

The CTCH also became a member of the Frente Popular, but never gained greater influence. The most important reason for this was the strong dominance of the PC and PS, which suppressed the traditionally strong anarchist tendencies of the Chilean trade union movement until the mid-1930s. In 1946, the CTCH was shattered by the union's stance on a wave of strikes.

In addition to the three big parties and the largest trade union CTCH, members of the Frente were also the splinter parties Partido Democrático and Partido Radical Socialista as well as social movements such as the Frente Único Araucano or the Movimiento Pro-Emancipación de las Mujeres de Chile (MEMCh).

The 1937 parliamentary elections were very positive for the Frente. The radicals increased their share of the vote slightly from 18% to 19% and the socialists almost doubled to 11%. The Communist Party had been banned by President Alessandri, but even under the name “Partido Nacional Democrático” it won 4% of the vote, four times as much as five years earlier.

The 1938 presidential election

For the 1938 presidential election , Pedro Aguirre Cerda (PAC) ran against Alessandri's liberal finance minister Gustavo Ross (“Orden y Trabajo”) under the motto “Pan, Techo y Abrigo” . This was based on the Partido Conservador , the Partido Liberal , the Partido Demócrata and the Confederación de la Producción y del Comercio (COPROCO, now CPC), founded three years earlier . After an attempted coup together with young Nazis ( Masacre del Seguro Obrero ), ex-dictator Ibañez had to withdraw his candidacy. Paradoxically, the imprisoned Nazis supported the Frente Popular and helped Cerda to win the election.

The Aguirre Cerdas government

Unlike the socialists, who, along with 30-year-old Salvador Allende, provided the health minister, the communists supported Pedro Aguirre Cerda's election campaign, but did not take part in the government. This was to prevent too strong an identification with the bourgeois president. The government, which was dominated by the radicals, did little to accommodate the workers' parties in terms of content and implemented hardly any worker-friendly policies, but the conflict did not become virulent due to the tense foreign policy situation during the Second World War.

General election 1941

The parliamentary elections in 1941 were a great success for the parties of the Popular Front. The workers' parties together achieve more than a third of all votes (the PS alone 17%) and the radicals improve again to 22%.

End of the Popular Front

Despite the election success, the Popular Front broke up in Chile in the same year when the PS and CTCH withdrew from the Popular Front. Ultimately, the contradictions in domestic and foreign policy were too great for a lasting alliance.

The radical governments until 1952

President Cerda died shortly after the socialists withdrew from the Frente Popular. In the new elections in 1942 , the Socialist Party again supported the radical candidate, Juan Antonio Ríos . This electoral alliance was called "Alianza Democratica" ( Democratic Alliance ) The Communist Party withdrew its own candidate Óscar Schnacke shortly before the election in order to prevent a victory for Carlos Ibañez, the ex-dictator, ex-Nazi and ex-coupist, which was supported by the conservative parties. The radical presidents Antonio Ríos and Gabriel González Videla ruled for the next ten years. Although they relied on campaign alliances and periodic parliamentary support from the workers' parties, they no longer formed a permanent coalition like the Frente Popular . On the other hand, the governments were extremely unstable (the average lifespan of a government was less than four months), the military were often appointed ministers and the radicals repeatedly resorted to the support of right-wing parties. In 1948 the Communist Party was even banned .

Demonstration for Allende

The Unidad Popular

The Frente de Acción Popular (FRAP) and its successor Unidad Popular (UP) was an alliance of left-wing parties that existed between 1958 and 1973 and with Salvador Allende 1970-73 also provided the president. Contemporary politicians as well as Marxist political scientists and historians often refer to this coalition as the "Popular Front". The UP differs fundamentally from the 1936 Frente Popular in at least two respects .

The FRAP / UP consisted only of revolutionary extremist left parties and did not include any bourgeois groups. The radical party was a member, but only after the moderate forces split off and renamed Partido de Izquierda Radical (PRI).
The UP was not founded in response to a fascist or Nazi threat to the country. Rather, it was about Chile's transition into a socialist society. The left saw the danger of a coup , but both the last right-wing government ( Jorge Alessandri , 1958–64) and the later dictatorship of Pinochet were largely fascist . This is expressed, for example, in the market-liberal economic policy orientation and support from monopoly capital. The Pinochet regime also resembles European fascisms of the 1930s and 1940s in its systematic brutality and hatred of "leftists".