Unión Demócrata Independiente

Unión Demócrata Independiente Independent Democratic Union
Party leader	Jacqueline van Rysselberghe
Secretary General	Issa Kort
founding	September 24, 1983 (mass movement) October 22, 1988 (re-established as a party)
Headquarters	Suecia 286 Providencia , Santiago Metropolitan Area
Affiliate foundation	Fundación Jaime Guzmán
Alignment	Gremialismus ( Anticommunism , neo , authoritarianism , National conservatism , right Populismus )
Colours)	Dark blue
Parliament seats	Senate: 9/43 Chamber of Deputies: 30/155
International connections	International Democratic Union
Website	www.udi.cl

The Unión Demócrata Independiente (Independent Democratic Union, UDI) is a right-wing conservative party in Chile . It was founded on September 24, 1983 during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet . Its founder Jaime Guzmán had been active in anti-communist organizations since 1965 and participated in the political shaping of the country as an advisor to Pinochet during the military dictatorship. From an initially weak position after the end of the dictatorship, the UDI has continuously gained support since Guzmán's assassination in 1991 and was able to overtake the Renovación Nacional (RN), which was competing with it for the votes of the right-wing electoral segment, in the presidential elections of 1999 for the first time. Since then, despite temporary losses until 2017, it was the strongest single party in Chile, which alone won more votes than any other individual party in almost all elections.

In 2009, the party participated in the conservative electoral alliance Alianza por Chile together with the liberal-conservative party Renovación Nacional (RN) . Today, the UDI, together with the Renovación Nacional (RN), Evolución Política (Evópoli) and Partido Regionalista Independiente Demócrata (PRI) parties, belongs to the government alliance Chile Vamos , on which the Chilean President Sebastián Piñera (RN) relies. For the first time in this millennium, the UDI was once again overtaken by its rival alliance partner RN in the parliamentary elections in Chile in 2017 .

Content profile

The UDI is committed to free trade and a free market economy, but also to a restrictive domestic policy and conservative values. The basic program of 1991 stands under the guiding principle of a Christian-occidental culture, which forms the basis for society. The family, national identity, personal freedom and the lean state form the basic values ​​of the party program. The UDI advocates the prohibition of abortions, property rights, freedom of enterprise, competition within social security and equal rights for women, including in their role as mothers. The party calls for Western democracy and competition between non-violent, patriotic and constitutional democratic parties. The UDI rejects both totalitarian ideologies, which, according to the party line, include above all Marxism , as well as its effects such as abortion , drugs and pornography as an attack on Western Christian culture.

The UDI supports private entrepreneurs and rejects joint ventures, it propagates work as the basis of society and calls for the amicable solution of collective bargaining disputes. The municipalities and regions, as well as the self-governing bodies, are to receive more powers.

Ideological background and internal structure

Headquarters of the UDI

The internal organization of the party is described as hermetic and is based on the leadership structures of Opus Dei , a Catholic lay organization to which many of its members and representatives are supposed to belong. In addition to Opus Dei, which has made a name for itself in more moderate political circles in Chile outside of the UDI in the past few decades, and later also the controversial Mexican religious order of the Legionaries of Christ , the founding generation of the party was ideologically with the integralist fighting organization Tradition Familie private property of the reactionary Brazilian Activists joined Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira . The founding group was based at the Law Faculty of the Catholic University of Chile (PUC) . He had good relations with the Colonia Dignidad , founded by the German sect leader Paul Schäfer and used as a torture camp during the dictatorship , where numerous internal events took place and which was protected from legal and police harassment by the UDI exponents after the end of the military regime .

The party is led by a chairman ( Presidente Nacional ) and a fifteen-member board ( Directiva Nacional ). Your youth association Nuevas Generaciones UDI organizes political campaigns with schoolchildren, students and professionals and is also active in the social field. The UDI has 17 regional associations (regions V, VII and X and the capital region are each divided into two associations), 22 local associations in the capital region and 52 provincial associations throughout the country. She introduced in 2016 a total of 58 of 345 mayors, including in Concepcion , Curicó and Viña del Mar .

Its followers feel connected to those segments of the Catholic Church that tended to be friendly towards the military dictatorship. Members of the Lutheran Church in Chile (ILCH), founded in 1975 as a regime-friendly counter-organization to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Chile and heavily influenced by German - Chileans , are also represented in the leadership of the party. Supporters of the UDI are mainly to be found in the upper and middle classes, while it achieves a lower percentage of votes in the lower classes. However, because of its more cohesive and more populist right-wing course, the UDI can mobilize voters from the lower classes much more efficiently than the market-liberal RN. While the majority of the UDI's supporters and members are female, until a few years ago the party's leadership was entirely in male hands. Jacqueline van Rysselberghe was the first woman to be elected to the party leadership in 2017. The election of the senator was the result of a direct election of the party leadership by members for the first time in the history of the party.

history

The Jaime Guzmán's Gremialist Movement

UDI founder Jaime Guzmán is considered to be the father of the current Chilean constitution from 1980

Guzmán studied at the Catholic University of Chile in 1967 . He was a great admirer of Chilean President Jorge Alessandri and admired the system of rule of Franquism in Spain . When profound reforms were pushed forward by students and teachers at the Catholic University in the course of the social movements of the late 1960s in order to meet the political and social challenges of the time, Guzmán and his followers, the so-called gremialists, were particularly popular among students and Professors from the law faculty had the backing, among the staunch opponents of the reforms. Guzmán became a sharp political agitator for the committee members. He rejected liberal democracy and advocated a corporatist state model. His ideas spread throughout the capital and his committee movement also won numerous followers outside the university.

The Marxist social policy of President Salvador Allende , who was elected in 1970, and massive resistance from conservatives, entrepreneurs and the USA plunged Chile into a serious political and economic crisis. With part of the economy nationalized, private investment declined for fear of nationalization. A flight of capital began for fear of expropriation. The government then printed new money, and inflation reached over 300%. The US government imposed a trade embargo that was supposed to damage the economy further. This led to massive protests in the country and among foreign investors, but also among truck drivers and anti-communist students.

The resistance of the elites against the Unidad Popular culminated in a coup on September 11, 1973 , which the UDI still calls "liberation from a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship". After the coup, Guzmán took part in the transitional government installed by the military and broke away from his corporatist demands. Mainly through his contacts with Sergio de Castro , one of the so-called Chicago Boys , he turned into a supporter of neoliberal politics. In contrast to his idol Jorge Alessandri, Guzmán was now open to the free trade ideas of the economic advisors commissioned by the military government. As a result, he moved politically closer to Head of State Augusto Pinochet , who in 1976 appointed Sergio Fernández as Minister of Labor and Social Affairs, with whom Guzmán formed a close team from then on. Although Pinochet valued Guzmán's intelligence and asked his advice on countless occasions, he mistrusted his political ambitions. Therefore, unlike the more loyal Sergio Fernández, Guzmán could not achieve any real position of power. However, Guzmán was a key figure in drafting the new 1980 constitution, which was supposed to function on the concept of a “protected democracy” ( democracia protegida ) and provided for both appointed senators and a binomial electoral system . After the economic crisis of 1982, which ended with the temporary expulsion of the Chicago Boys, Guzmán left the government and on September 24, 1983 founded a political fighting organization based on his ideas, the movement "Independent Democratic Union" ( Movimiento Unión Demócrata Independiente , UDI).

Creation and split of the Renovación Nacional

Guzmán's goal when founding the UDI was to create a large right-wing mass party that would outlast a possible end to the dictatorship and become the basis for a semi-democratic-authoritarian successor regime. After the end of military rule, Guzmán, who fundamentally rejected party democracy, wanted to prevent a return to the two-party system that existed in Chile before 1973, in which a right and a left bloc competed with one another, despite certain concessions to liberal-democratic ideas.

In this endeavor, in April 1987, his movement merged with other right-wing organizations. The merger partners included the “Movement for National Unity” ( Movimiento de Unión Nacional ) led by Andrés Allamand and the “National Labor Front” ( Frente Nacional del Trabajo ) led by Sergio Onofre Jarpa . Together they formed the rallying party Renovación Nacional , which was also joined by some supporters of the Partido Nacional , the traditional right-wing party of Chile that has existed since 1966. As part of the new alliance, the UDI retained its own profile, which led to internal tensions in the new formation and ultimately to its split. The more liberal wing around Allamand kept the name Renovación Nacional (RN), while the committee members reunited in the Unión Demócrata Independiente (UDI) , which was re-founded on October 22, 1988 by Jaime Guzmán as a party .

This was the position the party found itself in the 1988 referendum, when an eight-year extension of the term of office of then President Augusto Pinochet was voted on. The differences of opinion within the right-wing alliance weakened the camp of the so-called "yes parties", who stood up for another term of office of Pinochet, while the opposition fought with united forces for the rejection and with broad support of the people, which reached into the right-wing liberal camp, democratic elections prevailed the following year.

After the democratic elections

In the first free parliamentary elections in 1989, the UDI won 9.82% of the parliamentary seats and 5.11% of the Senate seats. Their party founder Guzmán ran in constituency no. 7, which included the north-west of Santiago de Chile . The two well-known opposition politicians, the Christian Democrat Andrés Zaldívar ( PDC ) and the Social Democrat Ricardo Lagos ( PSCh ), ran in the same constituency to prevent Guzmán's parliamentary mandate with a two-to-one majority. Guzmán came out in third place from the election, but still won enough votes to enter parliament.

As chairman of the UDI, Guzmán was one of the sharpest critics of the new, democratic government, whose alleged indulgence in the fight against left-wing terrorism he heavily criticized. Although he represented the then smaller of the two right-wing parties, he was regarded as the actual leader of the opposition. His intransigent attitude towards communist opposition circles from the time of the dictatorship made him the target of the terrorist group Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez (FPMR). On April 1, 1991, he was shot dead by Ricardo Palma Salamanca in the assassination attempt by a four-man FPMR squad when he was leaving the campus of the Catholic University after a lecture.

Rise to the strongest opposition party

Final rally of the UDI campaign in 2005

In the first free local elections in 1992, the UDI was able to provide 22 mayors and 178 city councilors, although the party was only represented in a third of the municipalities. That is why the founding of new local groups and the broadening of the electorate were among the strategic goals that were to be achieved by 1997. In its election campaigns, the UDI takes up the issues of unemployment, drugs and internal security.

The Unión Demócrata Independiente remained the smaller right-wing party in the early years of democracy compared to the Renovación Nacional. Through active political work and skillful communication, the UDI rose to become the strongest party in the right-wing alliance and overtook the RN. Its share of the vote grew from 12.11% (1993) to 14.45% (1997) to 25.19% in the 2001 parliamentary elections, when it became the strongest force before the influential Christian Democratic Party . From the local elections in 2004, the UDI emerged as the second strongest party in Chile after the Christian Democrats.

Tense relationship with the alliance partner Renovación Nacional

The relationship between the UDI and its alliance partner Renovación Nacional was strained by constant provocations. For example, the former UDI chairman Pablo Longueira regularly criticized RN chairman Sebastián Piñera with violent words . UDI's joint presidential candidate Joaquín Lavín defused the problem by persuading both party leaders to resign.

Senator Jovino Novoa , who replaced his controversial predecessor Pablo Longueira , is currently the party leader. The actual leader of the UDI is Joaquín Lavín , who was already politically active under the military government and gained great popularity after the transition as mayor of Las Condes , a wealthy municipality in the capital Santiago de Chile . In 1999 he was only barely defeated (48.69% to 51.31%) in the presidential elections to Ricardo Lagos Escobar, who was a candidate for the Concertación center-left coalition .

In the 2005 presidential election , the UDI was unable to agree on a common candidate with its ally Renovación Nacional, so in the first ballot on January 11, two right-wing candidates, Sebastián Piñera (RN) and Joaquín Lavín, ran for the UDI. After the candidate of the Renovación Nacional had received 25.41% more votes than Lavín (23.22%), Sebastián Piñera was supported in the runoff election on January 15, 2006 by both parties. He was defeated by the socialist candidate Michelle Bachelet . When he ran again as a joint candidate of the conservative parties, Piñera was able to win the presidential elections in 2010 and the UDI was involved in government for the first time since the fall of the dictatorship.

See also: Chile's party system

Results of the UDI in parliamentary elections

Election year	Share of votes		be right
1989	9.8%		667.369
1993	12.1%		816.104
1997	14.4%		837.736
2001	25.2%		1,547,209
2005	22.4%		1,475,901
2009	23.1%		1,525,000
2013	19.0%		1,179,342
2017	16.0%		957.032

literature

• Carlos Huneeus ( UC ): La derecha en el Chile después de Pinochet: el caso de la Unión Demócrata Independiente (PDF; 447 KB). Online publication: Archivo Chile , Working Paper 285, July 2001.
• María Olivia Mönckeberg: El poder de la UDI. 50 años de Gremialismo en Chile. Debate, Penguin Random House, Santiago de Chile 2017, ISBN 978-9-569-54563-4 .

Web links

Commons : Unión Demócrata Independiente  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Unión Demócrata Independiente
• Nuevas Generaciones UDI ( Memento of July 15, 2004 in the Internet Archive )

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b c} Marcelo Pollack: The New Right in Chile, 1973–1997. Palgrave Macmillan, London 1999, ISBN 978-1-349-40550-3 , pp. 161-163.
2. ^ Ricardo Pérez: La UDI sigue siendo el partido más votado. In: La Nación (Chile) , October 24, 2016 (Spanish).
3. ↑ ^{a b c d} Juan Andrés Guzmán: Interview with Juan Pablo Luna (Institute for Political Science of the PUC ). Published online, Ciper Chile, February 16, 2016, viewed March 26, 2019.
4. ^ ^{A b} Fiona Macaulay: Gender Politics in Brazil and Chile. The Role of Parties in National and Local Policymaking. Palgrave Macmillan, London 2006, ISBN 978-1-349-40853-5 , pp. 108-111.
5. ^ ^{A b} Franck Gaudichaud: Chilean solutions. In: Le Monde diplomatique , German edition, May 13, 2011.
6. ↑ Matías Rivas A .: María Olivia Mönckeberg: “Para el Opus Dei es muy complejo vivir en una sociedad cada día más abierta”. In: El Mostrador , December 11, 2018, accessed March 2019.
7. ↑ María Olivia Mönckeberg, Francisca Palma ( arr .): "No tenemos por qué estar con la Constitución de Jaime Guzmán". Interview on the website of the Universidad de Chile about her book El poder de la UDI , published in 2017, December 1, 2017, accessed in March 2019.
8. ↑ We document: Piñera appoints former supporters of Colonia Dignidad as Minister of Justice. In: News Pool Latin America , January 27, 2018, accessed March 2019.
9. ↑ Christian Kliver: Piñera in Berlin: doubts about dealing with the crimes of Colonia Dinidad in Chile. In: amerika21 , November 11, 2018, accessed March 2019.
10. ^ El nuevo Golpe de la UDI. In: El Siglo , No. 1568 (July 22, 2011), p. 8 f. (P. 9 on Ena von Baer ).
11. ↑ Jacqueline Van Rysselberghe se corona como la primera mujer presidenta de la UDI. In: Chicureo hoy , December 12, 2016, accessed March 26, 2019.