The Social Democrat Radical Party (Partido Radical Socialdemócrata) is a social democratic and liberal party in Chile.
The party is a member of Socialist International.
The party was founded as a progressive liberal party in 1861. In the twenthieth century the party was divided in liberal and social democratic tendencies. The political importance outweighed its electoral presence. The Radical Party owed its survival after the restoration of the democracy 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 Radicals succeeded in electing two senators and five deputies in 1989 and were allotted two out of twenty cabinet ministers, despite polls reporting that they had less than 2 percent support nationally. It remained to be seen if, over the long run, the Radical Party could compete with Chile's other major parties, particularly the PPD, which had moved closest to the Radical Party's traditional position on the political spectrum. (Source for this paragraph: U.S. Library of Congress Country studies)
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