Tumult, Conflict Give Way to Harmony as Vote Nears in Chile : Latin America: The opposition predicts a landslide win Thursday. But the new government will face an array of laws designed to limit its powers.

After two decades of tumult and conflict under Marxist rule and right-wing dictatorship, Chile’s politicians are displaying unaccustomed harmony on the eve of the nation’s return to democracy.

The center-left “rainbow coalition” predicts landslide victories in presidential and congressional elections Thursday to replace the military government of President Augusto Pinochet. Right-wing parties hope for at least a decent showing in House and Senate races.

Pinochet, the army general who seized power in a 1973 coup against Marxist President Salvador Allende, has been rushing through an array of laws designed to imprint his indelible stamp on Chilean life for years to come. The laws limit the next government’s control over economic policy, military decisions, television broadcasting, Supreme Court membership and numerous other appointments.

But Chile’s principal conservative party, National Renovation, has opted to stand firmly with the coalition in opposing Pinochet’s attempt to leave his successors with little to govern when they take office next March. Working together, the rival political movements have managed to limit the damage and in the process raise hopes of a political future more prone to consensus and accommodation.

Patricio Aylwin, the genial 71-year-old leader of the Christian Democratic Party who almost certainly will succeed Pinochet, has led the chorus of complaints against Pinochet’s “11th-hour laws.” Aylwin, who leads the 17-party center-left alliance, said in a campaign speech that the laws are “clearly aimed at tying the hands of the next government.”

The Roman Catholic Church also condemned the measures, saying that such major decisions should be left to the elected president and Congress.

The changes adopted or being considered by the four-man military junta, which serves as Pinochet’s legislature, include:

-- An administrative law guaranteeing the tenure of the nation’s 82,500 civil servants, most hired during the Pinochet years.

-- A proposed armed forces law that would give the service branches broad authority over promotions and the military budget. (Army commander Pinochet’s 1980 constitution already allows him and the other branch chiefs to keep those posts for up to eight more years.)

-- A law granting autonomy to the central bank and largely removing monetary policy from the executive branch, with a governing board appointed by Pinochet and immune from removal.

-- A law offering Supreme Court justices over 75 a chance to retire with a $17,000 payoff. Eight of 10 eligible justices accepted, allowing Pinochet to name their successors on the 17-member panel.

-- The appointments of more than 300 mayors, development council officials and government board members who cannot be removed except for misconduct.

Pinochet has said that he merely wants to ensure institutional stability in the future. He notes wryly that he is not the first outgoing president to decree measures before leaving office.

Several political analysts contend that Pinochet likely would have gone further had not the National Renovation party joined the opposition in criticizing some measures and calling for negotiations.

Recently, National Renovation joined in pressing for negotiations on the appointments to the new, powerful central bank board. The government announced last week that after talks with all the political parties, an agreement had been reached. The board members include two pro-Pinochet men, two economists from the opposition alliance and an independent chairman.

National Renovation represents Chile’s traditional political right and often has chafed at Pinochet’s derision of politicians. Sergio Onofre Jarpa, the party leader, only grudgingly ceded the right’s presidential candidacy to boyish Hernan Buchi, a Pinochet loyalist who served as finance minister until March.

Most polls give Aylwin a roughly 2 to 1 lead over Buchi and suggest that he will win a simple majority Thursday. A third candidate, right-wing populist businessman Francisco Javier Errazuriz, may attract enough votes to deny Aylwin a first-round victory over Buchi, forcing a runoff race in February.

Jose Luis Cea, an independent constitutional expert who advises National Renovation, said the party’s role would be pivotal for an Aylwin government, allowing it to limit the influence of leftist parties. He said a strong National Renovation showing would force Aylwin to stay in the political center and thus bolster business leaders’ confidence.

Cea said Pinochet’s last-minute legislation harked back to the first secretive years of the dictatorship.

“It is fundamentally contrary to the democratic spirit to pass these laws without debate or consensus. They are obviously meant to hamstring the future government and to control its use of resources,” he said.

Ricardo Lagos, a former Allende ally in the old Socialist Party who now heads the left-of-center Party for Democracy, said in a television debate: “There is now a substantial amount of maturity in Chilean politics. We recognize that we need to discuss health problems, schools and other important issues, and not rehash the old ideological debates.”

That is not to say that the campaign entirely lacks old-fashioned wrangles. Buchi accuses the Christian Democrats of cutting deals with the Communist Party, several of whose members are running as independents. An Aylwin victory, Buchi insists, will resurrect the strife of the Allende years and unravel the Pinochet era free-market economic reforms that have given Chile the most impressive growth statistics in Latin America.

And the coalition’s candidates--who uniformly vow to leave the economic program’s main features intact--often accuse the right of suddenly discovering the democratic spirit after supporting Pinochet all these years.

Yet the atmosphere is far more relaxed than during the plebiscite campaign, when police regularly fired barrages of tear gas at rock-throwing anti-Pinochet demonstrators and reports circulated of government plans to cancel the vote at the last minute.

Eduardo Frei Jr., a Senate candidate and son of a former Christian Democratic president, referred at a campaign rally to the demise of Chile’s penchant for tumult--and implicitly criticized his own party’s undermining of the Allende government in the early 1970s, setting the stage for Pinochet’s coup.

“We have learned the lessons of the past,” he said. “We are going to support this government from the first day to the last. We have proved able to reach agreements among many sectors with those who think differently. We understand what modern democracy means--conciliation and accord.”