The Unexpected Travails of the Woman who Would be President of Chile

Michelle Bachelet long looked a shoo-in for Chile's presidential election. Now she seems. certain to face a hard-fought run-off ballot

CHILE (Economist) December 9, 2005 — “SHE'S lovely,” enthused a middle-aged woman as Michelle Bachelet, the presidential candidate of Chile's centre-left Concertación coalition, toured a street market in a lower-middle-class area of Santiago. Kissing babies, embracing a distressed young mother and joking with stall-holders, Ms. Bachelet, a paediatrician, struck exactly the right note. She has long seemed to be cruising towards winning a fourth consecutive term for the Concertación, which has governed Chile with much success since the end of the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in 1990. She has much going for her. The economy is growing strongly. Ricardo Lagos, the outgoing president, is popular. The conservative opposition is divided.

As a woman in a socially conservative country, Ms. Bachelet represents change as well as continuity. She would be only the third woman to be elected president in Latin America—and the first who was not the widow of a public figure. She has argued that her sex is an electoral advantage: Chileans “don't only want a society that is successful but also one that protects; a woman can achieve progress on both fronts,” she says. Polls showed that most voters were happy to choose a woman.

Yet in the last few weeks, the outcome of the election on December 11th has suddenly looked less predictable. Opinion polls—oddly scarce and fallible in Chile —suggest that support for Ms. Bachelet is dropping. Sebastián Piñera, the more moderate of the two conservative candidates, has gained ground. A poll this week by CERC suggested that Ms. Bachelet would get 46%, Mr. Piñera 25% and Joaquín Lavín, the other conservative, 21%. That would mean a run-off election on January 15th—and one that might be far from a walkover.

The campaign has not seen sharp policy disagreements. The three main candidates all promise economic stability, more jobs, greater equality of opportunity, better education, and more support for small and mid-sized businesses. All, too, promise better pensions.

Despite her campaigning skills, Ms. Bachelet, a moderate socialist, has made mistakes. She performed nervously in all three television debates. She has yet to master the crisp sound bite. That halting performance may have caused some voters to have second thoughts about having a woman as president.

Her message has seemed curiously mixed. On the one hand, she is highly cautious: she claims. pensions would be her priority, but instead of proposals for reform she promises only a commission to study the issue. On the other, she has sometimes spoken like an old-fashioned socialist. She has been oddly loath to associate herself with Mr. Lagos's government. She invited Cristina Fernández, the fiery wife of Argentina's president, to her final campaign rally. That was unsettling for moderate voters, who mistrust the Argentine government's increasingly populist policies. In the event, the rally was cancelled after five of Ms. Bachelet's campaign workers were killed in a road accident.

None of this would have mattered much had her only rival been Mr. Lavín, the hard line conservative whom Mr. Lagos defeated in 2000. Mr. Lavín no longer has the appeal of being a fresh face. Mr. Piñera's advent seemed at first merely to split the opposition vote. Now he seems. to be attracting centrist Concertación voters. A far-left candidate, Tomás Hirsch, has also run an effective campaign, and could take up to 7% of the vote.

Ms. Bachelet might have to make some nods to the left to win over Mr. Hirsch's voters in the second round. That could give Mr. Piñera—assuming he bests Mr. Lavín—an opportunity. But Mr. Piñera has a problem of his own: conflicts of interest. He is a successful businessman and one of Chile's richest men (worth perhaps $1.3 billion). He has a big stake in LAN, the national airline, which operates in Peru, Argentina and Ecuador too. He also owns a television channel. He has promised that, if elected, he would sell these assets. But his wealth—he is said to have paid for his campaign from his own pocket—has hampered him with poorer voters. In a run-off, some of Mr. Lavín's supporters among the poor might switch to Ms. Bachelet.

Much will depend, too, on the result of the congressional election also taking place on December 11th. The Concertación hopes to achieve a majority in both houses. If it does, that would help Ms. Bachelet. Despite showing herself to be fallible, she still looks likely to be Chile's next president. But should her vote fall much below 45%, that loss of momentum could yet turn the run-off into a nail-bitingly close-run affair.