Socialist Party of Chile
칠레 사회당
A left-wing Chilean party founded on 19 April 1933 by several socialist groups. It took part in coalitions such as the Popular Front, the Popular Action Front and Popular Unity, and two of its members, Salvador Allende (1970–1973) and Michelle Bachelet (twice), became president. Banned after the 1973 coup, it split into several factions that reunited only with the return to civilian rule in 1990.
In depth
According to the Spanish source, socialist thought in Chile goes back to Francisco Bilbao and Santiago Arcos in the mid-19th century and spread in the labour movement in the early 20th century through leaders such as Luis Emilio Recabarren. The Great Depression found expression in the short-lived Socialist Republic of 1932, and on 19 April 1933, at 150 Serrano Street in Santiago, delegates of the Marxist Socialist Party, New Public Action, the Socialist Order and Revolutionary Socialist Action founded the Socialist Party of Chile and elected Óscar Schnake its first secretary general. The English source also names Colonel Marmaduque Grove and Salvador Allende among the co-founders.
According to the English source, the party joined the Popular Front in 1938 and helped elect the Radical Pedro Aguirre Cerda, with Allende becoming health minister. At the party’s 9th Congress in 1943 Allende displaced Grove and withdrew the party from the Ríos government, and the party went through splits and decline in the 1940s. It split again in 1948 over the “Defence of Democracy” law banning the Communists, then the Popular Action Front (FRAP) was formed in 1956 and the two socialist parties reunited in 1957. In 1969 the Socialists, Communists, Radicals and others formed Popular Unity, and Allende was elected president in 1970. From 1971 Carlos Altamirano led the party in a more radical direction.
Augusto Pinochet’s coup of 11 September 1973 overthrew Allende’s government, and the military junta banned the Socialist Party along with the other left-wing parties. Within weeks four Central Committee members and seven regional secretaries had been killed, and many members were imprisoned or went into exile. In 1979 the party split between Clodomiro Almeyda’s faction and Altamirano’s “renewed” faction, and in the 1980s the factions opposed the dictatorship in different ways. The “renewed” Socialists founded the Party for Democracy (PPD) in 1987 as an “instrumental” party for the plebiscite, with Ricardo Lagos as its president.
According to the Spanish source, the party was formally reconstituted on 8 March 1990; the English source records its first direct secret-ballot internal election in 1989 and its entry into the Socialist International. After the return to democracy it belonged to the Concertación and the Nueva Mayoría, and Socialists Ricardo Lagos (elected in 1999–2000) and Michelle Bachelet (2006–2010, 2014–2018) became president. The Spanish source says that after 1990 the party added radical-democratic thought, left Christianity, secular rationalism and human rights to its Marxist base. It has been led by Paulina Vodanovic since 2022.