Socialist Party of Chile

The Socialist Party of Chile (Spanish: Partido Socialista de Chile, or PS) is a centre-left political party founded in 1933.

Its historic leader was President of Chile Salvador Allende, who was deposed in a coup d'état by General Augusto Pinochet in 1973. The military junta immediately banned socialist, Marxist and other leftist political parties. Members of the Socialist party and other leftists were subject to violent suppression, including torture and murder, under the Pinochet dictatorship, and many went into exile.

Twenty-seven years after the 1973 coup, Ricardo Lagos Escobar won the Presidency as the Socialist Party candidate in the 1999–2000 Chilean presidential election. Socialist Michelle Bachelet won the 2005–06 Chilean presidential election. She was the first female president of Chile and was succeeded by Sebastián Piñera in 2010. In the 2013 Chilean general election, she was again elected president, leaving office in 2018.

The Socialist Party of Chile was co-founded on 19 April 1933, by Colonel Marmaduque Grove, who had already led several governments, Oscar Schnake, Carlos Alberto Martínez, future President Salvador Allende, and other personalities. After the Chilean coup of 1973 it was proscribed (along with the other leftist parties constituting the Popular Unity coalition) and the party split into several groups which would not reunite until after the return to civilian rule in 1990.

Socialist thought in Chile goes back to the mid-19th century, when Francisco Bilbao and Santiago Arcos opened a debate on civil rights and social equality in Chile. These ideas took hold in the labour movement at the beginning of the 20th century and, along with them, the various communist, anarchist, socialist, and mutualist ideals of the time were diffused by writers and leaders such as Luis Emilio Recabarren. The impact of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia imparted new vigor to Chile's revolutionary movements, which in the 1920s were mostly identified with the global Communist movement; the Communist Party of Chile was formed.

The Great Depression in the 1930s plunged the country's working and middle classes into a serious crisis that led them to sympathize with socialist ideas, which found expression in the establishment of the short-lived Socialist Republic of Chile in 1932. The idea of founding a political party to unite the different movements identified with socialism took shape in the foundation of the Socialist Party of Chile, on 19 April 1933. At a conference in Santiago, at 150 Serrano, 14 delegates from the Socialist Marxist Party led by Eduardo Rodriguez Mazer; 18 from the New Public Action, headed by the lawyer Eugenio Matte Stolen; 12 delegates of the Socialist Order, whose main exponent was the architect Arturo Bianchi Gundian; and 26 representatives of the Revolutionary Socialist Action of Óscar Schnake formulated the new party's founding document and its short-term action plan, and elected Óscar Schnake as its first executive Secretary General.

The Party's Statement of Principles was:

The Party quickly obtained popular support. Its partisan structure exhibits some singularities, such as the creation of "brigades" that group their militants according to environment of activity; brigades that live together organically, and brigades of militant youths such as the Confederacy of the Socialist Youth, and the Confederacy of Socialist Women. In the later 1930s they included the "Left Communist" faction, formed by a split of the Communist Party of Chile, headed by Manuel Noble Plaza and comprising the journalist Oscar Waiss, the lawyer Tomás Chadwick and the first secretary of the PS, Ramón Sepúlveda Loyal, among others.