Half an hour
after the polls were closed, the predictions were confirmed: Bachelet
had received 53 percent of the votes, against 46 for his opponent,
Piñera, one of the biggest and most successful entrepreneurs
in Chile. Piñera immediately acknowledged Bachelet's triumph
and wished her luck.
By now, of
course, the news is not who won the presidency but that, in the
electoral field, Chile behaves as a developed and predictable
nation. This allows us to make the following observation: Chilean
society happily has crossed the threshold of common sense.
Chile is
the exception in Latin America. It is impervious to madmen and
mayhem. It has no room for people like Hugo Chávez or Evo
Morales. It is not fertile ground for a racist like Ollanta Humala
of Peru, who suddenly endangers his country's general stability
with barracks proposals filched from fascist corporatism.
Intense
exchanges
The Left
that rules Chile is the Left of Tony Blair and Felipe González.
It is a Left that, instead of nationalizing the sources of production,
stimulates private enterprise and adopts measures to facilitate
the functioning of the market. A Left that signs treaties for
trade openings with the United States, the Mercosur, the European
Union and South Korea because it has learned that Chile's growing
prosperity depends, in large measure, on those intense exchanges.
A Left, in sum, that governs honestly with the ideas of the Right
-- which explains why it is so difficult to defeat it.
What is that
desirable ''threshold of common sense'' and how can it be reached?
In essence, the threshold of common sense is that point in history
when a decisive percentage of the ruling class agrees on the diagnosis
of the ills that plague society and the measures that must be
taken to excise them.
In Spain,
for example, that point was reached in the late 1970s, after the
death of Francisco Franco, when the Right and the Left agreed
to respect the basic, successful economic rules of the capitalist
model tried out by the dictator, beginning with the reforms of
1959. To those rules they added democracy as a way to form a government
and make collective decisions.
Something
similar happened in Chile in the early 1990s, during the administration
of Patricio Aylwin, the first democratic government post-dictatorship,
when the Christian Democrats had the good sense to not renounce
the good aspects of Pinochet's economic policy and to add to them
the component of a liberal democracy.
That is why
the Coalition for Democracy repeated its election victory for
the fourth time: Chileans view Bachelet as a moderate and trustworthy
person who will imperil with extravagant experiments the relative
prosperity that Chileans have managed to achieve .
This is not
to say that the Chile Bachelet will govern doesn't face serious
problems. Yes, Chile in its 16 years of democratic rule, and continuing
a previous trend, reduced poverty from 42 percent to 18 percent.
But it is becoming increasingly difficult to further reduce those
levels of misery and to bridge the enormous gap that separates
the poor from the rich.
First
World nation
The country
also continues to depend on exporting its natural riches -- copper,
fish and certain agro-industrial products, for example -- without
taking a final leap toward a true modern society capable of adding
great technological and scientific value to its production, which
is key to the prosperity of First World nations. This indicates
that Chile suffers from certain important deficiencies in the
educational and entrepreneurial fields.
In any case,
the country has the civic and human capital needed to proceed
on the right path. Ricardo Lagos, the very popular departing president,
estimates that Chile could become a First World country in 2010.
In terms of purchasing-power parity, Chile already has an annual
per-capita income of $10,700, the rule of law functions reasonably
well and the levels of corruption are similar to those of Germany.
If the nation
that already crossed the threshold of common sense manages to
cross the threshold of development, it could well become the model
that Latin America needs in the face of the incessant natter of
the pernicious Banana Left. We have to bet on that.
