On to female politicians I like: Michelle Bachelet will step down as Chile's president in March, after her four-year term ends. (Chile, like many Latin American countries, prevents presidents from serving consecutive terms as president. Their constitutions include these provisions to guard against the region's history of caudillos, though leftist egotistical presidents there have lately sought to change this.) Amazingly, she takes about a 70 percent approval rating with her. Disappointingly, she wasn't able to transfer her popularity to her coalition's candidate to succeed her, Eduardo Frei, son of a former president, who lost last week to the right's candidate, Sebastian Pinera, a billionaire businessman.
Chile's post-World War II political history has always fascinated me: A democratically elected Socialist president, followed by a military coup that brought a brutally repressive dictatorship and remarkable economic growth, followed by a return to democracy that has sustained that economic growth so that it's reaching a 30-year run now and created a peaceful, exciting, vibrant country. That the coup's date was Sept. 11 and within a week of the day Chile declared its independence from Spain is odd, to say the least. That the dictatorship brought such growth, to the point that Chile's economy is stronger than other South American country's except Brazil, is perhaps the ultimate morality test. Which would you rather take?
Bachelet's personal history reflects the country's tangled one. Her father was a military general under Salvador Allende, the Socialist, who died as a result of the Pinochet regime's torture. Bachelet and her family lived in Germany in exile for many years. She returned to Chile for her medical degree -- she's a doctor by profession -- and upon the country's return to democracy she worked in public health, eventually becoming Chile's health and defense ministers. As president, she sustained economic growth, though at a slower rate during the global recession of the past two years, while bolstering the country's social programs.
Mary Anastasia O'Grady, the WSJ's columnist on Latin America, took Pinera's victory, which featured a remarkably low turnout among people younger than 30, as confirmation that Bachelet's administration and her coalition's policies hurt the Chilean economy and the free market should be unfettered at all times. But then, the Journal's editorial pages writers and editors are as dogmatic as Stalin, and never waste an opportunity to try to make the richest of the richest of the richest even richer. Chilean youth's lack of interest in politics is something I discussed in a political science course in 2005, and is nothing specific to Bachelet. And her coalition, Concertacion, had held the presidency for all 20 years of Chile's current democratic era, so restlessness among voters was bound to set in at some point. It has here in the U.S. with Obama and the Democrats after only one and three years, respectively.
Even Pinera says he plans to keep the country's balance of growth boosterism and social spending as it was under Concertacion. Nothing suggests that the country won't sometime in the mid-term future return to left-center administrations. If anything, Bachelet demonstrates that democratic capitalism can create growth while still creating a more equal society when managed wisely.
Update: My fiancee and I discussed whether I need to remove "Michelle Bachelet and the side streets of Provi[dencia]" from my Facebook profile's list of personal interests, now that she's leaving office, but we decided it can certainly stay.
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