Chile: Un nuevo ciclo político
Chile: Un nuevo ciclo político
Ficha técnica
hile: A New Political Phase
The aim of the present article is to describe the new political era opened up in Chile with the recent presidential elections. The new Head of State Michelle Bachelet leads a coalition of center-left which aims to definitively complete the process of transformation of the political structure inherited from the Pinochet dictatorship. The new government is also dealing with the challenges faced by all contemporary representative democracies and induced by changes in the world of communication as well as in the global political and economic structure. In order to outline the profile of the new Chilean political order, the essay examines the fundamental elements that characterized the period from the transition to democracy —which began in 1990— to the Piñera presidency. During the years of the Concertación governments, Aylwin and Lagos presidencies gave start to a slow and gradual transformation of the neoliberal economic model built during the years of dictatorship, of the rules restricting the freedom of expression and political organization, as well as of certain prerogatives of the armed forces. This already conservative process of change slowed down considerably since the election of Piñera in 2009, who was the first president of the democratic right of the time. The conservative administration proved incapable to convincingly address the social issues that had grown up in the meantime by taking the form of massive popular movements, such as the student one. Unable to keep the leadership of the country despite good economic growth rates, the right was defeated after just four years since the return of Bachelet. The new President and her political majority are now faced with a double challenge: on the one hand there is the need to implement social reforms able to achieve a greater equality; on the other it is essential to change the constitutional order to definitively overcome all those legacies inherited from the dictatorship and passed intact through the phase of transition.
