Chile’s Winds of Change: The Real Thing or The Most Discreet of Nudges
On December 13th, Chilean billionaire and rightwing candidate of the newly formed “Coalition for Change,” Sebastian Piñera, won a striking plurality of 44%. The modestly center-left Concertación candidate Eduardo Frei won 29% of the vote, forcing a runoff slated for January 17th. Since replacing the country’s brutal military dictator Augusto Pinochet through a national referendum in 1988, Chile’s center-left coalition, La Concertación, has achieved significant progress on both social and economic fronts, reducing Chile’s poverty rate from over 40% to approximately 15%, while boasting the region’s most impressive growth tempo since 1990.
When considered in the context of La Concertación’s well-documented success, the state of the current presidential elections is somewhat surprising. The nation’s current Concertación coalition president, Michelle Bachelet, has an approval rating of 81% as she approaches the end of her term. However, Concertación’s present candidate and former president, Eduardo Frei Tangle, has failed to ride the surge of Bachelet’s popular support and galvanize the now-fractured Concertación after Socialist party candidate Marco Enriquez-Ominami (MEO) split from the coalition in September to run as an independent.
This analysis was prepared by COHA Research Associate Evan Ouellette
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