Piñera, the president who could not recover after the fierce social crisis in Chile

The billionaire businessman Sebastian Piñera dreamed of being president of Chile and he succeeded twice, but his second term collided with an unprecedented social outbreak from which he could not recover and put an end to his ambition to become a benchmark for a modern right.

With a fortune valued by Forbes at about US $ 2,900 million, Piñera sought to become an example of a democratic right, when in his first term (2010-2014) he called civilian defenders of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship “passive accomplices” (1973 -1990) and closed a special prison for violators of human rights, something that no leftist government dared to do.

In his second government, which began on March 11, 2018 and begins to say goodbye this Sunday when 15 million Chileans vote for his replacement, he sought to show himself as a regional leader at the head of a country that he defined as “an oasis” in America Latin.

In February 2019, he showed solidarity in the Colombian city of Cúcuta when he offered Venezuelans a special visa to receive them in Chile. While internally, it deepened the neoliberal model and stopped the social reforms initiated by the socialist Michelle Bachelet.

But his ambitions went down the drain on October 18, 2019, when after days of student protests over the rise in the Santiago metro passage, the largest social uprising in decades began in the country, which left 34 dead and hundreds of injured.

“Piñera had the desire to represent a modern, democratic right,” says Claudia Heiss, academic of Political Science at the University of Chile. “I had the intention of definitively closing the transition” in Chile, he adds.

Inflection point

Waiting to consolidate his international leadership by hosting the COP25 climate summit and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) at the end of 2019, Piñera had to cancel both events amid massive protests, demanding a greater social equality.

“The next day after the social outbreak, the Piñera government ended in political terms, in terms of influence,” says Axel Callis, Chilean electoral analyst and director of the Tuinfluyes.com agency.

That citizen revolt went from the streets to the institutions through a political agreement to call a plebiscite for the citizens to decide on the drafting of a new Constitution. This process was approved and is underway, after the election in May of 155 conventioneers, on a parity basis and with 17 seats reserved for indigenous people.

“What happened is a change in the axis of power. In one way or another a parliamentary regime was installed, without the corresponding institutional framework – when Chile is a presidential regime – and everything began to happen in relevant political terms in Parliament, ”says Callis.

With this protagonism of the citizens, the Parliament and the Constituent Convention, the Executive remained in the background and Piñera “ceased to be a valued, strategic or significant actor,” according to the analyst.

Piñera finished his first term with a 50% approval. But now his government raises just 12%, according to the Data Influye survey published on November 3.

Double-sided government

Although Piñera’s intention was, according to Heiss, “to put an end to the divisions that come from the dictatorship”, his government “oscillated between two versions”, which generated “an ambiguous position” regarding the issues that have marked his second mandate.

“He was never very clear about support for the political agreement (to call for a constitutional plebiscite); he never wanted to say if he was for the ‘approval’ or ‘rejection’ in that referendum, “says Heiss.

For the academic, this absence caused the growth of the extreme right, represented by the candidate of the Republican Party, José Antonio Kast; An open critic of Piñera, to the detriment of the ruling party candidate, former Minister Sebastián Sichel.

With a very active parliament, Piñera will end his term with the sad record of having been the only president in 31 years of democracy to be twice constitutionally accused by Congress.

The last one, for having sold a mining company in an operation carried out in a tax haven, a case reported in the so-called “Pandora Papers”.

Accusations of human rights violations also resonate during social protests, denounced by international organizations.

Pandemic vaccines

With initial criticisms of his late measures to control the pandemic and provide social assistance, followers and detractors however agree in highlighting the efforts of his government to have vaccines for the entire population early.

Chile is today one of the countries with the highest percentage of the population immunized against the coronavirus, with 90.38% of the population having at least two doses (13.7 million people), among its 19 million inhabitants.

It has also been a pioneer in applying a third booster dose to its population.