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Bachelet’s most tenacious second-term foe? Lofty expectations.

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Michelle Bachelet, Chile’s president between 2006 and 2010, pulled off Sunday what no other Chilean president has done since the return of democracy in the post-Pinochet era — win a second, non-consecutive term.chile

To draw a contrast to the United States, only one president managed to return to the White House after leaving it — Grover Cleveland, who served two non-consecutive terms in the 1880s and the 1890s, though he’s routinely ranked among the more forgettable and inconsequential of US presidents.  Although it’s an inexact analogy (US presidents have never been barred from holding two consecutive terms the way that Chilean presidents are), Bachelet now faces the challenge of becoming one of Chile’s transformational 21st century leaders — in short, her challenge is not to become Chile’s Grover Cleveland.

Her return as president follows a four-year interregnum of government by Chile’s center-right — and in Sebastián Piñera, a president who represented the most moderate tendencies of the Chilean right, largely unsullied by association with the 17-year military regime of Augusto Pinochet.  Piñera’s term has been marked by relatively robust economic growth and sound government, even if Piñera himself hasn’t always been the most effective advocate for his own administration.  That became especially clear as Piñera seemed to lose control of the tussle between his government and student protesters throughout his term in office.

Moreover, the center-right did itself no favors in the process of nominating a candidate to succeed Piñera — the initial resignation of frontrunner Laurence Golborne last spring over private-sector scandal, the subsequent primary fight within the Chilean right between the more moderate Renovación Nacional (RN, National Renewal) and the more conservative Unión Demócrata Independiente (UDI, Independent Democratic Union), the sudden withdrawal of the primary winner Pablo Longueira, and his hasty replacement with former labor minister Evelyn Matthei as the standard-bearer of the fractured center-right Coalición por el Cambio (Coalition for Change) — widely referred to as the Alianza por Chile (Alliance for Chile).

But even in a parallel universe where a united Alianza backed a scandal-free Golborne, Bachelet was always deemed the favorite to win the Chilean presidency.  Furthermore, though Bachelet nearly routed Matthei in the first round (46.70% to 25.03%), she won a nearly two-to-win landslide against Matthei in Sunday’s runoff (62.16% to 37.83%).  But as Bachelet prepares to return to La Moneda, she should fear that the same forces that rendered the Piñera administration so unpopular could also render her second term even more  unpopular, especially after raising such high expectations in her successful second-term presidential campaign.

Part of the problem is that her constituency today covers a wider portion of Chile’s political spectrum than it did in her first victory eight years ago.   Continue reading Bachelet’s most tenacious second-term foe? Lofty expectations. →

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Bachelet’s ambitious agenda to be determined by result of Chile’s parliamentary elections

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No matter who wins tomorrow’s presidential election in Chile — and by what margin — we will know much more about the nature of the Chilean government over the next four years from the result of the other elections that will be held.chile

Those are the parliamentary elections, in which Chileans will elect all 120 members of the Cámara de Diputados (Chamber of Deputies), the lower house of Chile’s parliament, and half of the 38-member Senado (Senate), the upper house.

The inability of current president Sebastián Piñera to win absolute majorities in the Chilean parliament in the previous December 2009 elections constrained his legislative ability over the past four years to enact the kind of market liberalization or other reforms that Piñera might otherwise have pursued.

Likewise, though former president Michelle Bachelet is the overwhelming favorite to return to La Moneda, the Chilean presidential palace, the extent to which her administration will be able to enact campaign promises depends in large part on her ability to win a parliamentary majority for the broad left coalition that she leads, Nueva Mayoria (New Majority), which is essentially a rebranding of the broad center-left coalition of Chilean parties, the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia (Concert of Parties for Democracy) — with the recent addition of the Partido Comunista (Community Party) and a couple of other minor parties.

Though it seems likely that Bachelet’s coalition will win a majority in both houses, no one knows how large their margin will be — and, of course, with the widening of the previous Concertación to include the Communists and other far-left groups, maintaining unity within Bachelet’s coalition will be even harder in the years ahead.  That’s especially true in light of the lofty platform that Bachelet has outlined during her campaign —  Bachelet hopes to achieve major tax reform (an increase in the corporate tax rate from 20% to 25% and a cut in the maximum income tax rate from 40% to 35%), education reform (free access to university within the next six years) and, most ambitiously, a new Chilean constitution.  Constitutional changes require a two-thirds majority in both houses, an outcome that’s extremely unlikely, and even large-scale reforms, such as the kind Bachelet hopes to enact for Chilean education, require a four-sevenths majority.

That, in turn, is due to Chile’s electoral system, which is designed to avoid large majorities in either direction.  In respect of the Chamber of Deputies, Chileans vote in 60 constituencies that elect two members each — Chile’s unique binomial system that Pinochet’s advisers stitched into Chile’s current constitution before ceding power to civilian leadership in 1989.  While each coalition can run two candidate in each district, the typical result is that each major coalition each wins one seat in each constituency — one coalition will only be awarded both seats if it defeats the second coalition by a two-to-one margin.  A similar system exists for the Senate — Chileans elect two senators in each of 19 senatorial districts.

Moreover, Bachelet faces a new challenge from the Partido Progresista (Progressive Party of Chile), the party created two years ago by Marco  Enríquez-Ominami, who won about 20% as an independent candidate in the previous 2009 presidential election and who is running again in this weekend’s presidential election.  Although no one predicts that the Progressive Party is likely to steal many seats in the parliamentary vote, even one or two seats in each chamber could significantly alter Bachelet’s ability to govern.  Continue reading Bachelet’s ambitious agenda to be determined by result of Chile’s parliamentary elections →

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Can Bachelet win a first-round victory in Chile’s presidential election?

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Michelle Bachelet is almost certain to set a new precedent in post-Pinochet Chilean politics when she wins a second (non-consecutive) term as president, returning to the office she held between 2006 and 2010. chile

But it’s an open question as to whether Bachelet (pictured above) will do so with a first-round victory — meaning that Bachelet will need to win at least 50% of the vote on Sunday, November 17 in order to avoid a runoff later in December.

Bachelet’s victory would return the broad center-left Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia (Concert of Parties for Democracy) to La Moneda, Chile’s presidential palace after the center-right presidency of businessman Sebastián Piñera, the first non-Concertación president in Chile’s post-Pinochet era, which began with the October 1988 referendum in which Chilean voters opposed extending the reign of Augusto Pinochet’s  on

Some polls show Bachelet tantalizingly close to achieving enough support for a first-round victory.  An Opina Research poll published by El Comercio earlier this week shows Bachelet with 46%, to just 22% for Evelyn Matthei, the candidate of Chile’s center-right coalition, the Coalición por el Cambio (Coalition for Change), but widely known as the Alianza por Chile (Alliance for Chile).  A Centro de Estudios Públicos poll from last week shows Bachelet with 47% and Matthei with just 14%.

But an even more recent IPSOS survey conducted between October 19 and November 5 shows that Bachelet is very likely to head to a runoff — even after stripping out undecided voters, Bachelet won just 35% and Matthei won 22%.

Bachelet’s problem is that Matthei doesn’t represent her sole competition.  Two third-party candidates routinely poll between 10% and 15% in surveys, and they could shake up Sunday’s race if Bachelet’s supporters remain complacent and center-right voters remain unenthusiastic about Matthei.

The first is Marco Enríquez-Ominami (popularly known as ‘MEO’), who burst onto the Chilean political scene in 2009 when he left the Partido Socialista de Chile (PS, Socialist Party of Chile) to run for president as an independent.  MEO ultimately won 20% of the vote, falling behind both Piñera and the runner-up, former president Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle.  Enríquez-Ominami founded the Partido Progresista (Progressive Party) in 2010, and he’s running again for president on a stridently leftist platform that openly embraces the communist legacy of former Chilean president Salvador Allende, who died in the 1973 coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power.  The events of both the Allende presidency and the Pinochet regime continue to loom heavily over Chilean politics.

But another independent candidate has stolen some thunder from both MEO and Matthei.  Franco Parisi, a popular economist and business professor, and a a former councillor of Chile’s copper commission between 2010 and 2012, is running as a centrist candidate in the presidential elections.  Matthei has launched a negative onslaught against Parisi over the past few weeks, accusing him of owing $200,000 in back wages to employees, and though her negative attacks have reversed some of Parisi’s gains, he’s still polling in the mid-teens.

A third candidate, Marcel Claude, a former official in Chile’s central bank and an environmental activist, is running as an independent with the endorsement of Chile’s small Humanist Party.

In the most recent IPSOS poll, 15% of voters supported Parisi, 12% supported Enríquez-Ominami, 7% supported Claude and 5% supported other small candidates — taken together, that means that 39% of Chileans support a third candidate in 2013, even more than support Bachelet.  Moreover, depressed turnout for Mathei’s candidacy could conceivably launch either Parisi or Enríquez-Ominami into a runoff with Bachelet — it would be the first such presidential runoff that didn’t feature a race between the mainstream center-left Concertación and the mainstream center-right Alianza.  Continue reading Can Bachelet win a first-round victory in Chile’s presidential election? →

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Does the Chilean right have any chance in November against Bachelet?

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Earlier this year, before anyone had jumped into the Chilean presidential race, you could easily have thought that the inevitable candidacy of popular former center-left president Michelle Bachelet was a kind of dress rehearsal for Hillary Clinton’s potential 2016 U.S. presidential race.chile

After four years away from La Moneda, Chile’s presidential palace, and fresh off a stint with the United Nations as the head of the newly created UN Women group, Bachelet was not only the overwhelming favorite to win the presidential nomination of the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia (Concert of Parties for Democracy), the coalition of Chile’s center-left parties, but to win the November 17 election outright, perhaps with enough support to win an absolute majority and avoid a presidential runoff for the first time in two decades. 

True to form, Bachelet returned to great fanfare in March, declared her candidacy for president and won the Concertación primary with over 75% of the vote, putting her on track to accomplish what no other former president has done in the post-Pinochet era — return for a second term at La Moneda.  While Chilean presidents are prohibited from running for reelection, they are not prohibited from running for a second, non-consecutive term.

But the path has only smoothed for Bachelet as the Chilean right has lurched from one crisis to the next, settling on its third-choice candidate for president, Evelyn Matthei (pictured above) late last month.

Her hasty selection ensures that the next president of Chile will almost certainly be a woman, but it also establishes a new dynamic in the race.

Matthei and Bachelet were once childhood playmates when their fathers served together in Chile’s air force.  Matthei’s father, however, supported Augusto Pinochet after the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende.  Bachelet’s father, a general who opposed the coup led by then-general Pinochet, was later imprisoned and tortured by the Pinochet regime until he died in 1974 imprisoned.  Bachelet and her mother emigrated to Australia and East Germany, though Bachelet returned to Chile in 1979 to pursue a career as a pediatrician.

Matthei is not incredibly conservative on social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, and she has a reputation as an outspoken, independent, and sometimes profane voice in Chilean politics.  Given that she’s more personable than the candidate she replaces, Pablo Longueira, a former senator and minister of economy in Piñera’s administration, she could well turn out to be a better standard-bearer for what was always going to be an uphill fight.  It also helps that she’s not burdened with having directly supported Pinochet in the 1980s, tedious baggage that Longueira would have carried with him into the election.  Pinochet’s toxic legacy is one reason that Piñera has been only the first right-wing president Chilean president since the Pinochet left office in 1990.  Piñera himself has become increasingly unpopular in office, though he’s bounced back from a 2012 nadir — the latest July Adimark survey gives him a 37% approval rating (with 53% disapproval).

Longueira abruptly withdrew from the race in late July after disclosing that he was suffering from severe depression.   Continue reading Does the Chilean right have any chance in November against Bachelet? →