Chileans were preparing to return former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet to the presidency yesterday, hoping she can fulfill promises to reform a dictatorship-era system they blame for keeping the working classes poor and indebted to the privileged few.
Chile is the world’s top copper producer and its fast-growing economy, low unemployment and stable democracy are the envy of Latin America.
However, its citizens have taken to the streets in recent years, venting their frustration over the huge wealth gap between the rich and poor and a chronically underfunded education system.
Many voters blame policies imposed during Chilean general Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship for keeping wealth and power in very few hands. His regime privatized natural resources and many government functions and ended the central control and funding of public schools.
Bachelet, 62, is a former political prisoner, pediatrician, defense secretary and Socialist Party stalwart who is a centrist at heart.
She left office with sky-high approval ratings after her presidency from 2006 to 2010, despite failing then to bring about major changes in society. However, this time, she has taken up the protesters’ cause, vowing major changes in taxes and education to reduce the wealth gap.
Bachelet and her closest rival yesterday, Evelyn Matthei, were childhood friends and daughters of generals who found themselves on opposite sides after Chile’s 1973 coup, when Matthei’s father ran the military school where General Alberto Bachelet was tortured to death for remaining loyal to ousted Chilean president Salvador Allende.
The last survey by Chile’s top pollster CEP found 47 percent of declared voters going for Bachelet, suggesting she has a good chance at an outright majority when voters who did not reveal their preferences to pollsters cast ballots.
Matthei got 14 percent in the poll, which had a 3 percentage point error margin. Seven other candidates trailed, although independents Franco Parisi and Marco Enriquez-Ominami were gaining ground.
Chileans were yesterday also to choose 120 members of the lower House of Congress and 20 out of 38 Senate seats.
Unfortunately for Bachelet, her New Majority coalition will not be able to secure more seats unless it wins at least two-thirds of the votes in each district, under Pinochet’s “binomial” electoral system, which was designed to frustrate change.
“You almost feel sorry for her because she’s going to be stuck between the future and the past,” said Peter Siavelis, a political science professor at Wake Forest University and author of Democratic Chile: The Politics and Policies of a Historic Coalition.
“There all these demands in the streets for constitutional reform but she’s facing a Congress that’s going to be elected by the binominal elections system,” Siavelis said. “There’s not going to be a majority there. So the influence of the dictatorship is going to impact on her reforms.”
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver