Appeal to the Arbiter

There was none of the jostling, banner-waving excitement of a normal Chilean election. The festooning posters that usually blot out Santiago were scarcely in evidence, and even the slogans were muted. That is the way Eduardo Frei, Chile's new Christian Democratic President, wants it. Next week, when 2,920,000 voters choose a full Assembly and half of the Senate, the issue, as Frei somberly puts it, is whether or not they will "make a Parliament for Frei"--in other words, make it possible to carry out the platform on which he was elected last September.

In a head-to-head campaign against Chile's powerful, Communist-dominated leftists, Frei (pronounced Fray) was swept into office with 54% of the vote, the greatest plurality in Chilean history. He won partly because of his own magnetism, partly because of his ambitious ideas to cure Chile's many economic and social ills. Yet in office he has been stymied by a lame-duck Congress in which his Christian Democrats control only 24 of 147 Assembly seats and nine of 45 seats in the Senate. His opponents in six other parties have blocked him to the point where he finally withdrew his entire program until after election day. Said Frei: "I will appeal to the people as the supreme arbiter."

From Right & Left. Frei proposes a state bank to force down the high interest rates charged by Chile's private banks and thus help rein in inflation (up 38% in 1964), land reform to distribute unused or badly administered estates to 100,000 landless peasants, tax reform to raise rates on middle and high incomes, school reform to upgrade Chile's lagging primary and secondary schools. He wants to deflate the government's ballooning bureaucracy and amend the constitution to protect workers' rights to join unions. His most controversial proposal is the "Chileanization" of the country's copper industry; the government would acquire 51% interest in the U.S.'s Braden Copper Co. and a 25% interest in two new U.S. ventures in return for an $80 million payment and a promise of stable taxes. Frei claims that the scheme would double Chilean copper exports to $1.2 billion by 1970.

Chile's two conservative parties, which largely supported him during the presidential elections, now attack Frei's program chiefly because of its proposals for higher taxes, a state bank and land reform. The three moderately leftist parties resent Frei's plans because he has stolen their social-reform thunder. On the extreme fringes, the Communists and Socialists denounce everything, particularly the copper plan, which they rail at as a mere ruse to allow foreigners to exploit Chile's riches.

Hoping to Lead. In his calm, professorial, yet somehow messianic manner, Frei has gone over all the programs once more during the election campaign. He has held rallies up and down the 2,600-mile length of his country and spoken time after time over radio and TV. Though his Christian Democrats face the vote-splitting opposition of eleven other parties, they are still expected to win 56 to 60 Assembly seats and pick up two Senate seats for a total of eleven.

If so, Frei will have more than the magical one-third of the Assembly that, in Chile's parliamentary practice, is enough to sustain a presidential veto and prevent any opposition coalition from ramming through a contrary program. And in Chile's fractured party system, one-third of the Assembly will be something no other party has achieved in the past 13 years--a strong hint to the other parties to stop blocking and start cooperating.

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