A Hesitant Landslide: The Return of Chile’s Bachelet

A Hesitant Landslide: The Return of Chile’s Bachelet

Bachelet campaign ad for higher education (RiveraNotario, 2013, Flickr creative commons)

Former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet’s return to power with 62 percent of the vote on Sunday was the chronicle of a victory foretold. She had left office in 2010 (Chile’s constitution bars consecutive re-election) with 80 percent approval ratings. Her new program embraces popular reforms put forward by the student protesters of the last few years, including free higher education, higher taxes on big companies, and a new constitution to replace the one enacted during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. She led every poll, and her campaign ads made her victory seem inevitable.

Yet her December 15 landslide election returns—she won by twenty-five points, the widest margin of victory since Chile’s return to democracy—are somewhat misleading. In the first-round vote on November 17, 54 percent of voters chose someone other than Bachelet, forcing Sunday’s runoff vote between her and conservative runner-up Evelyn Matthei. Only four in ten Chileans bothered to show up to the runoff, fewer than in any presidential election since 1970. This was a hesitant landslide.

The quiet at the polls paradoxically follows the most significant political awakening since the 1988 plebiscite that ousted Pinochet. The 2011–12 student protests, which rallied hundreds of thousands to the streets, had cast into doubt the party-dominated politics and market-friendly consensus that characterized Chile in the two decades between Pinochet and Bachelet’s first administration. At one point in 2011, 80 percent of Chileans supported the students, while conservative President Sebastián Piñera’s approval ratings were in the mid-20s.

This unrest baffled many foreign observers: the protesters represented the most prosperous generation in Chilean history, most of them first-generation college students, living in a country with low unemployment and high growth rates. But although my post-Pinochet generation had eagerly marched through downtown Santiago, singing songs and wearing Guy Fawkes masks, it did not march to the voting booths. Save for four student leaders elected to Congress, the romance and idealism of the protests were not represented in electoral politics.

The low turnout comes two years after Congress passed a law making voting voluntary, a reform ironically intended to increase turnout. Under the previous system, registering to vote was optional but voting was mandatory once registered. This had created an ossified electorate in which the old and middle-aged (most of whom had registered during the high-turnout 1988 plebiscite that ousted Pinochet) voted while the young did not. The number of voters remained stuck at roughly 8 million between 1989 and 2009, even as the population grew from 13 to 17 million. Under the reform, everyone is automatically registered but voting is no longer mandatory. The result was a slump in voters to only five-and-a-half million.

Does this low turnout indicate complacency or a complete dissatisfaction with the status quo? Bachelet does offer changes that most Chileans want. In her campaign she promised to take on long-standing problems of inequality and political reform. At the same time, candidates offering even greater change failed to gain much traction in the first round. Marco Enriquez-Ominami, a left-wing independent in favor of political renewal, got 10 percent. Three candidates offering more radical changes totaled less than 7 percent. It seems that many Chileans are not satisfied with their politicians and the state of society, but they feel vague unease and indecision, not outrage.

In a country run by efficient technocrats, people yearn for romance in their politics. The apparent end of history, with its predictable prosperity—skyscrapers, malls, suburban developments, highways—can be dull. Chile remains an unequal country, and this inequality has been experienced anew by elements of the still precarious middle class. But there is something else too: a discontent with prosperity, much as there was in parts of Europe and America in the 1960s. Many Chileans, myself included, suspect that something is missing from our late-capitalist society, but we are not sure exactly what.

After decades of fervent political belief, whether in Allende’s socialism or Pinochet’s neoliberalism, no candidate or ideology gets mass and enthusiastic commitment. This seems less like apathy than a developed political sensibility. The electorate does not have the sky-high expectations many feared Bachelet’s return would raise, but they are willing to give her another try.


Diego Salvatierra is a recent graduate of Yale University who lives in Santiago, Chile.


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