January 25, 2006
Bachelet's Challenge in Chile
By Carlos Alberto Montaner
Michelle Bachelet and Sebastián Piñera carried out good election campaigns, both colorful and modern. Shortly before Election Day, the pollsters made their predictions: Bachelet, a 54-year-old socialist physician, multilingual, former minister of health and defense, should win by about five percentage points.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.
©2006 Firmas Press
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/com-1_25_06_CM.html