Chile Turns Rightward

It is striking to consider that the 20-year reign of the center-left Concertación in Chile lasted longer than the 17-year regime of Augusto Pinochet, given that one of the key tasks of the past 20 years in Chilean public life has been to put to rest the ghosts and demons of the Pinochet era.

After defeating former president (and son of yet another former president) Eduardo Frei in today's election, Sebastián Piñera will take the reins of government as the first center-right president of Chile since the fall of the Pinochet regime and as the first duly-elected president of the center-right since Jorge Allesandri in 1958.

Remarkably, in a fact pattern that looks to repeat itself later this year in Brazil, a moderate leftist -- in Chile, Michelle Bachelet -- left office with high popularity but remained unable to carry a successor to victory. In many ways, Bachelet's popularity is somewhat of a second act in itself, coming after a horrible first year that saw the trashing of Chile's education system and of Transantiago, the public transit project in Santiago, the Chilean capital.

Presidents may not run for reelection in Chile (but can run after an interval out of office, as Frei did). It is certain that Bachelet may yet have another act in Chilean politics if she wants it.

Meanwhile, Chile has weathered the global economic crisis as well as any other nation, is generally regarded as the most dependable and stable of Latin America's economies, has escaped the boom-and-bust trap, given its dependence on commodities, especially copper, and has been fiscally prudent over the past two decades. Chile is is poised to benefit from good relations with the U.S., China and Brazil, and is set, this month, to become the first South American nation to join the OECD (although the real mystery may perhaps be why it took so long).

Piñera's campaign - LGBT-friendly and otherwise inclusive, remained socially progressive in a country where abortion is still illegal, pledged commitment to the social framework established by two decades of the Concertación and took pains to show that his election would not mark a return to the demons of the Pinochet era.

Elements with ties to the Pinochet era remain part of the Chilean right and in the Chilean aristocracy, as vividly portrayed in Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits, but if Piñera has even a mediocre term as president, he will nonetheless have successfully pushed Chile into a true two-party democracy.