Democracy News

Center-Right Candidate Elected in Chile
January 27, 2010
By: Benjamin Russell | Printer Friendly

Sebastián Piñera, a billionaire businessman from Chile’s center-right party, defeated the center-left former president Eduardo Frei in a January 17th runoff election, to become the country’s first right-wing president since the end of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in 1990.

Piñera ran on a platform of change, promising a break from the Concertación coalition that had run the country for two decades, according to The Economist.  The extent to which his policies will represent a real shift from those of his predecessors, though, is an open question, according to Foreign Policy’s Elizabeth Dickinson.  Economic policies and social welfare programs have been effective and popular, says Dickinson, and Piñera may be expected to leave well enough alone. 

Those reforms that Piñera has proposed may be difficult to achieve.  Promises to reform the education system and partially privatize the state copper company, Codelco, will likely face heavy resistance from the powerful teacher’s and miner’s unions, respectively.

At least symbolically, though, many see the election as a step in the right direction for Chilean democracy.  "This finishes the transition," said a Piñera supporter in Dickinson’s report. "This closes the Pinochet chapter, and now we have a chance to start over."

Sources:

The Economist – Right again

Foreign Policy – Is the Pinochet era finally over?