Chilean voters on Sunday stepped back from a precipice. In a runoff election pitting former president Sebastian Piñera against Senator Alejandro Guiller, sanity prevailed, albeit by a slightly anorectic margin of 54 to 46. Piñera election to a non-consecutive second term was a roller coaster ride. In the first round the center-right candidate received 37 percent of the vote, with another 8 percent going to conservative candidate José Antonio Kast. However a ragtag and bobtail of left wing candidates garnered the remaining 55 percent of the vote, including 23 percent for Guiller, 20 percent for alt-left candidate Beatriz Sanchez, and 6 percent each for Carolina Goic and Marco Enriquez Ominami, respectively the candidate of the moribund Christian Democratic Party of Chile, and the leftover candidate of the alt-left from the preceding election cycle. While overall turnout rose between the first and second rounds from 6.7 million to 7 million,
Piñera seems to have netted an extra 850,000 votes between the two rounds, which means that on the order of 550,000 people likely crossed over to the right to give Piñera his total. Four factors seem to have contributed to the victory. First, there was the current president, Michelle Bachelet, who was elected on a promise of free university education for all, something even the Western European social democracies with three times Chile’s per capita income can’t deliver. Neither could Bachelet. What she did manage to do was to wreak havoc with K-12 schooling, implementing draconian reforms aimed at eliminating for-profit schools accepting vouchers, despite their performing on par with government run municipal schools, and creating a school assignment process reminiscent of the court-ordered busing programs of 40 years ago in the United States. One casualty of this program was the Instituto Nacional, an elite public school open to talented children regardless of family income where no fewer than 17 former presidents studied as children. The Institute is now only allowed to screen a fraction of its applicants, vitiating its elite status, not a problem for the children of the well-to-do who can readily study elsewhere, but a serious loss for talented children from families of limited means. Taxes went up during four years of Bachelet, while growth rates came down. On the international front, Bachelet resisted her own Supreme Court when it intervened on behalf of two political prisoners being held by leftist thug Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. She will not be missed.A second factor in Piñera‘s favor was his opponent. A former journalist, Guiller jumped into politics four years ago, winning election as senator from Antofagasta in Chile’s arid north. Substituting ideology for ideas and innuendo for charm, Guiller has a knack for alienating even his ideological allies. This was perhaps part of the genesis Piñera’s third key advantage: the Frente Amplio. Resurrecting the name of a coalition of the left that held power 70 years ago, this coalition came together during the last 18 months. Cobbling together a group of alt-left legislators ,the Frente Amplio included former members of the student movement that extracted Bachelet’s unfulfilled promise of universal free higher education. This coalition tapped discontent with slow growth and frustration among young people trying to break into the labor market, propelling their presidential candidate Beatriz Sanchez to a remarkable 20 percent of the first round vote, nearly eclipsing Guiller, and garnering 20 of the 155 seats in the lower chamber of Chile’s Congress. While the breadth of support for this alt-left coalition of Greens and “revolutionaries” is impressive, it lacks depth. The coalition’s voters are united more by their frustrations with the status quo than they are by a shared vision of a better future.Finally, there are the death agonies of the Christian Democratic Party of Chile, the “DC.” In contrast with the center-right Christian Democratic parties around the world, the D.C. was, in the words of one of its main proponents Ignacio Walker, “the Social Democratic Party Chile never had.” Staking out a position on the center-left, it won the presidency no fewer than three times during the past 28 years. In 1990, senators from this party accounted for nearly half of the upper chamber. In last month’s election, the D.C. won just 14 seats out of 155 in the lower chamber, six fewer seats than the insurgent Frente Amplio. It appears that many of the 388,000 voters who supported Goic in the first round transferred their support to Piñera in the second.Not on the list of Piñera‘s advantages was his first term as president. From 2010 to 2014 he occupied the presidential palace in Santiago. While he made a number of sensible decisions on quotidian matters of policy, he exhibited a flawed grasp of the larger panorama. Despite having sufficient intellect to have earned a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, and to have made millions as an investor, he loosed a veritable tsunami of malapropisms too embarrassing to translate, while he ran the presidency like a ruthless CEO, treating the voters as consumers and abandoning friends and allies to pander to polls. He “pulled the plug” on a needed electric generating plant, and a dam, which have thus not been built, and he pandered to student protesters by jettisoning not one but two education ministers for having the temerity to do their jobs, and he promised to dedicate a transient windfall from copper revenues to subsidize university tuition.Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith once described the United States as “the land of second chances”—the place where you can fail and fail again until, if you have the grit to keep trying, you finally succeed at something. During the 1990s, Chile distinguished itself among Latin American countries by growing more rapidly than the United States, making up some of the outputgap that widened during most of the 20th century between South and North America. Perhaps the “second chance gap” has narrowed as well: Both Chile and Piñera now have a secondopportunity to make and implement good decisions. Let us hope they make the best of it, and that they have learned from their past mistakes. In today’s world it is unwise to count on thirdchances in either hemisphere.
