ished in 1957. It adopted its present name after uniting with several other centrist groups. It elected Frei to the Senate while capturing fourteen seats in the Chamber of Deputies. The party polled 20 percent of the vote in the presidential race in 1958, with Frei as standard-bearer. In 1964, with the support of the right, which feared the election of Allende, Frei was elected president on a platform proclaiming a "third way" between Marxism and capitalism, a form of communitarian socialism of cooperatives and self-managed worker enterprise. In the aftermath of the military regime, the PDC emerged as Chile's largest party, with the support of about 35 percent of the electorate. The PDC had been divided internally by a series of ideo;ogical, generational, and factional rivalries. The PDC, however, retained a commitment to social justices while embracing the fre-market policies instituted by the military government. Although the Aylwin administration was a coalition government, the PDC secured ten of twenty cabinet seats. In the 1989 elections, the Christian Democrats also obtained the largest number of congressional seats, with fourteen in the Senate and thirty-eight in the Chamber of Deputies. In October 1991, in a major challenge to President Aylwin and the traditional leadership of the party, Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle was elected PDC president, placing him in a privileged position to run for president as the candidate of the CPD. Another party that could be classified as centrist was the Radical Party, whose political importance outweighed its electoral presence. The Radical Party owed its survival as a political force to the binomial electoral law inherited from the military government and the desire of the Christian Democrats to use the Radical Party as a foil against the left. It was to the Christian Democrats' advantage to provide relatively more space to the Radicals on the joint lists than to their stronger PPD partners. The Ra...
