CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN
Last Sunday Chileans, rich and poor, selected their new President for the next four years, Sebastián Piñera, billionaire owner of his own national TV channel and right wing candidate of the Coalition for Change. Just what kind of change the masses of low and moderate income voters had in mind when they made their choice is subject to debate. The change that voters from the Barrio Alto hoped for was visible in some of the jubilant post-election celebrations where images of former dictator Augusto Pinochet were were dusted off and paraded through the streets. The changes that Piñera actually intends to implement will be known in time.
Expect conservative business owner Piñera to be more aggressive and less bi/multi partisan than our own Change President. He has not been officially installed yet and there are already hints of what he has in mind.
WASHINGTON'S MAN IN SANTIAGO
On the international or hemispherical front, Piñera is already waving his sabre at Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. Undoubtedly as one of the few individual success stories of the Capitalist model and now as leader of the Chilean Miracle that the Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys cooked up in Latin America, he feels it's his duty to challenge the successes and failures of the Socialist model's experiment that is Venezuela.
At the very least, those pulling the strings in Washington will profit from having a Latin American voice attacking Chavez and any attempts to raise all Venezuelans out of ignorance and poverty.
CONTROL THE MESSAGE
On the Chilean political front, Piñera understands the importance of controlling the message and his election has caused concern among journalists about the future of free speech. As reported in La Nación:
A juicio del presidente del Colegio de Peridodistas el caso de Iván Núñez revela que "alguien como Piñera sabe perfectamente que las cosas que se dicen o hacen tienen repercusión en la opinión pública, por eso es bueno que se transparente".
As a businessman and member of the power elite he has learned the lesson that "things said and done affect public opinion." Consequently he has already made it clear to journalists that questions about his business dealings will not be answered. Not that he has anything to hide, of course.
Even more disturbing are the indications that La Nación, Chile's left leaning newspaper is itself under attack. From the article quoted above:
Respecto de la situación de La Nación, el timonel del Colegio de Periodistas afirmó que "hemos tenido informaciones que no son categóricas".
"Escuché al senador (Andrés) Chadwick, que planteó una situación distinta (a un eventual cierre) y a nosotros nos interesa saber cuál es el criterio frente al diario".
Agregó que "frente a los medios escritos nos interesa mucho que se mantenga en un papel por lo menos independiente".
There is concern that if La Nación is not shut down completely, it may lose its independence and freedom to investigate and report unpopular findings. Remember the former glory of NPR?
CHEAP LABOR CONSERVATIVE
On the Chilean economic front, Piñera is already revealing himself to be just another Cheap-Labor Conservative and the change he is threatening to bring to the working classes who voted for him is to lower the minimum wage.
Diversos actores como la ministra del Trabajo, el presidente de la CUT y el director del Injuv, rechazaron la propuesta del líder del comercio, que planteó rebajar el salario mínimo del grupo entre 18 y 21 años.
Excited by his election, these protectors of labor are reconsidering lowering the minimum wage for workers 18 to 21 years old. One has to wonder if this is the change these youngsters or workers in general had in mind when they marked their ballots.
LESSONS
But there are lessons to be learned from the ongoing Chilean experiment that have to do with what works and what doesn't work in their electoral system.
Chileans limit their presidents to a 4 year term of office. Now my wife is from Chile, she is never wrong, and she has assured me that President Bachelet is so popular that she could easily have won reelection if not for the term limits. If true, this election illustrates the downside of term limits, a case where voters were denied their most popular choice and are instead facing an unexpected and potentially life changing alternative.
The Chilean runoff system may also have helped produced an anomalous result. There was a very popular Independent candidate in the race initially. Marco Enríquez-Ominami received 20% of the vote in the election of 12/13/09, and dear wife tells me that he would have done better but that he was perceived as being too young to hold that office. Since no candidate scored a majority in that election, all but the two top vote-getters were discarded and another runoff election was held last Sunday. The contest between the "center-right" Piñera and the "center-left" former president Frei was tainted by the bad feelings still lingering from the latter's previous term of office. So, I'm told, the result reflects more a vote against Frei than a vote for Piñera.
This illustrates the downside of runoff voting. Would the results have been different had they used a system more like IRV experiments being carried out here? What if they'd eliminated the lowest scoring candidate one at a time and accordingly recalculated the ranked choices of the voters?
What worked in this election? In Chile all eligible voters are required to vote. (They have recently exempted the elderly sick.) Some are chosen and required to work at the polls. The elections are held on Sunday and those working have the right to leave work to vote. The ballots are paper and hand marked. They are hand counted and the results are known the same day if the spread is not too small.
The population of Chile is 16.6 million with more than 12 million 15 years of age or older. That amounts to a lot of paper ballots to count by hand. But it apparently works, for good or for evil.