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Politics
Chile's Constitution was approved in a highly irregular national plebiscite in September 1980, under the military government of Augusto Pinochet.
It entered into force in March 1981.
After Pinochet's defeat in the 1988 plebiscite, the Constitution was amended to ease provisions for future amendments to the Constitution.
In September 2005, President Ricardo Lagos signed into law several constitutional amendments passed by Congress.
These include eliminating the positions of appointed senators and senators for life, granting the President authority to remove the commanders-in-chief of the armed forces, and reducing the presidential term from six to four years.
Chileans voted in the first round of presidential elections on December 11, 2005.
None of the four presidential candidates won more than 50% of the vote.
As a result, the top two vote-getters—center-left Concertación coalition's Michelle Bachelet and center-right Alianza coalition's Sebastián Piñera—competed in a run-off election on January 15, 2006, which Michelle Bachelet won.
She was sworn in on March 11, 2006.
This was Chile's fourth presidential election since the end of the Pinochet era.
All four have been judged free and fair.
The President is constitutionally barred from serving consecutive terms.
Chile's bicameral Congress has a 38-seat Senate and a 120-member Chamber of Deputies.
Senators serve for 8 years with staggered terms, while Deputies are elected every 4 years.
The current Senate has a 20-18 split in favor of pro-government Senators.
The last congressional elections were held in December 11, 2005, concurrently with the presidential election.
The current lower house—the Chamber of Deputies—contains 63 members of the governing center-left coalition and 57 from the center-right opposition.
The Congress is located in the port city of Valparaíso, about 140 kilometers (84 mi.) west of the capital, Santiago.
Chile's congressional elections are governed by a binomial system that rewards large representations.
Therefore, there are only two Senate and two Deputy seats apportioned to each electoral district, parties are forced to form wide coalitions and, historically, the two largest coalitions (Concertación and Alianza) split most of the seats in a district.
Only if the leading coalition ticket out-polls the second-place coalition by a margin of more than 2-to-1 does the winning coalition gain both seats.
In the 2001 congressional elections, the conservative Independent Democratic Union surpassed the Christian Democrats for the first time to become the largest party in the lower house.
In 2005, both leading parties, the Christian Democrats and the UDI lost representation in favor of their respective allies Socialist Party (which became the biggest party in the Concertación block) and National Renewal in the right-wing alliance.
The Communist Party again failed to gain any seats in the election.
(See Chilean parliamentary election, 2005.) .
Chile's judiciary is independent and includes a court of appeal, a system of military courts, a constitutional tribunal, and the Supreme Court.
In June 2005, Chile completed a nation-wide overhaul of its criminal justice system.
The reform has replaced inquisitorial proceedings with an adversarial system more similar to that of the United States.
Source: CIA Factbook, Wikipedia
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