PIÑERA COMBINES BEST, WORST OF CHILEAN POLITICS

From kpcnews.com
January 20, 2010

http://www.kpcnews.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=10094:Piñera-combines-best,-worst-of-Chilean-politics&catid=102:other-local-columnist



By Catherine Housholder
Billionaire businessman Sebastián Piñera was elected president of Chile on Sunday. Triumphing with 52.6 percent of the vote, he is the first candidate from the right to win the Chilean presidency in 52 years, and the first president in 20 years who is not from the center-left Concertación coalition.



Piñera combines the best and worst of Chilean politics. Exactly what Chile needs and what it does not need. The best: an unequivocally democratic opposition leader who sees economic innovation as key to development. The worst: a symbol of the disheartening tendency of the super-wealthy achieving more political power.

In a country where an anti-Pinochet politician from the right was often hard to come by in the 1990s, Piñera´s opposition to the Pinochet dictatorship gave him an important credential. However Latin America is considered by many experts to be the most economically unequal region in the world. So here in Chile — where the size of your bank account is more often than not proportional to your political power — Piñera´s election is also seen by many as an example of what money can buy.

I met Piñera in June, 2005 when he was running for president against the Concertación´s Michelle Bachelet, who went on to become Chile´s first woman president. I was a college student interning for The Santiago Times.

Foreign reporters were invited to Piñera´s office in the ritzy Las Condes sector of Santiago. I was the first to arrive. Less than 10 journalists showed up. At the age of 20, I turned out to be the youngest.

Piñera is and was at the time one of the richest men in Chile. Owner of the Chilean airline LAN and the television station Chilevisión, he also is credited for introducing Visa and Mastercard to Chile about 30 years ago.

I only mustered up the courage to ask Chile´s airline-television-credit card tycoon one question. Piñera — who has a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard — surely could have answered me in English.

As the candidate of the Renovación Nacional party, Piñera won enough votes in the first round in December 2005 to qualify for the second round in January 2006. But the Concertación´s Bachelet evoked too much maternal warmth, female-powered momentum and motherly charisma. Piñera looked cold, poker-face and business-like during the campaigns. I remember that in the foreign journalist press conference he hardly cracked a smile. He lost in 2006 with 46.5 percent to Bachelet´s 53.5 percent.

Most people remember the 2005-2006 campaigns because they resulted in the election of the country´s first woman president. But the other highly significant fact of those elections was that for the first time the right was represented in the second round of voting by a candidate who had not supported the violent dictatorship of the 1970s and 80s.

Every country needs a viable opposition, and the subtle turn from a Pinochet-stained right (led by Joaquín Lavin of the UDI) to an anti-Pinochet right (led by Piñera) has been a remarkably under-reported phenomenon. Piñera voted “no“ in the 1988 referendum which asked Chileans whether they wanted the Pinochet rule to continue. That referendum was closer than most Chileans would like to think: The Concertación-led “no“ campaign contributed to the 56 percent tally for “no“ while 44 percent voted in favor of Pinochet who is credited for jumpstarting the economy in the 1980s and imprisoning, torturing and killing thousands of alleged leftists. (Pinochet died of old age in 2006).

So the up-side of Piñera is that he represents “cambio” (change) and the democratic wing of the right which during the 1990s tended to be heavily influenced by “Pinochetistas.” After 20 years of Concertación rule — despite Bachelet´s up to 80 percent approval rating — many Chileans began to believe that their country needed to give the opposition a chance to govern. Piñera´s popularity seems to be partially due to the Concertación´s inner quibblings and power struggles as well as a national desire for a breath of fresh air.

Piñera´s down-side?

Money.

During the 2005-2006 and 2009-2010 political campaigns, reporters plagued Piñera with business vs. politics questions. Chile is known for having relatively low levels of corruption, but billionaire politicians always tend to raise red flags. “Shouldn´t you sell your stocks and get out of business while you run for president?“ was a typical question on the campaign trail.

Piñera´s answer to money and politics essentially did not change from 2005 to 2010. Here´s what I had recorded from the press conference in 2005:

“I’m a businessman and all of Chile knows it. When I was a senator, everyone knew that I was an important shareholder of LAN Chile. My interests, my stocks and my companies have always been above the table. It seems much more dangerous to me the fact that there are certain authorities, ministers, regional governors, judges and deputies who are businesspeople, and no one knows it. The best way to avoid this is transparency.”

Despite reporters’ prodding, it is still not quite clear how much Piñera spent on his campaign. But no one from the right was thinking about that as they danced to live cumbia music on the streets of Santiago on Sunday night, celebrating their first triumph in more than 50 years. And Piñera — in a significant departure for his intellectual, Spartan image — was all smiles as he partied until 1 a.m. Not very late at all, by this country´s standards, but what do you expect from the new most powerful man in Chile?

Catherine Housholder is a 2003 East Noble High School graduate. She works in Santiago, Chile, and is a second-year master´s student in political science at the Universidad de Chile. The subject of her undergraduate senior thesis at Smith College was the use of gender in the Bachelet campaign. Housholder argued that thanks to her political skills, Batchelet’s most potent campaign weapon was her gender. Contact her at catherinehousholder@gmail.com.