MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Queen Michelle Bachelet is back, but that was the easy bit, says The Economist

The New Majority of Bachelet seems to commit the same mistakes as the old Concertacion

Michelle Bachelet became the first person since General Carlos Ibañez in 1952 to return to Chile’s presidential palace, La Moneda, for a second term. According to a recent official history of the building, the general was a stickler for fitness.

 Each morning his staff would arrive to find him hanging from the wrought-iron bars on his office window, wearing only his underpants, performing pull-ups. Ms Bachelet is likely to spare her aides such a spectacle, but she might need a bit of the general’s muscle to keep her fractious coalition in line.

As a candidate, Ms Bachelet could do no wrong. She breezed through last year’s election campaign and won December’s vote by a mile. The run-up to her inauguration has been tougher.

In late January Ms Bachelet named 32 undersecretaries to serve in her government, which assumed power on March 11th. Four of them have already quit. The first, Claudia Peirano, had been due to serve in Ms Bachelet’s education ministry: a big post given the huge student protests of recent years. Within hours of her appointment, the students dug out an open letter from 2011 in which Ms Peirano questioned the wisdom of providing free education to all university students. That clearly contravenes Ms Bachelet’s stated education policy and within days Ms Peirano had stepped aside.

Next to go were Hugo Lara and Miguel Moreno, also would-be undersecretaries. Mr Lara was accused of dubious business practices while Mr Moreno, it emerged, was fined in 2011 for groping a woman on the Santiago metro.

Finally, Ms Bachelet’s armed-forces undersecretary, Carolina Echeverría, stepped down on March 9th, just two days before the government handover. She is the daughter of a retired army colonel accused of torturing prisoners during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Ms Bachelet insisted that the daughter should not be blamed for the alleged sins of the father, but the pressure proved too much and Ms Echeverría tendered her resignation.

To lose one undersecretary on the eve of taking office may be regarded as a misfortune but to lose four looks like systematic carelessness. Either Ms Bachelet’s team didn’t vet its candidates properly, or it did and concluded that their past misdemeanors and personal stories were of no consequence. Either way, it doesn’t look good. “It suggests they weren’t prepared, which is pretty surprising given it’s been clear for the past year they were returning to power,” says Robert Funk, director of the Centre for the Study of Public Opinion at the University of Chile.

Ms Bachelet’s opponents have pounced on the blunders as proof that her centre-left coalition is as aloof and hermetic as it always was. As the Concertación, the coalition ruled Chile for 20 years after the return to democracy but by the time it left power in 2010 it looked jaded. Too many people had been in government for too long.

After four years in opposition and with the tremendously popular Ms Bachelet at the helm, it’s supposed to be returning renewed and reinvigorated. It’s even changed its name: it’s now the Nueva Mayoría (New Majority) and has been expanded to include more parties. But after the shenanigans of the past few weeks, Chileans can be forgiven for thinking it’s still the same old Concertación.

Her hope will be that things will settle down now she has her feet under the table. Ms Bachelet enjoys a clear majority in both parliamentary chambers, something the outgoing president Sebastián Piñera lacked. She has published a list of 50 proposals for her first 100 days in office, including measures that go to the heart of her manifesto: promises to send bills to parliament to reform the country’s education system, in order to provide free tuition for all, and tax systems, in order to pay for the education reforms. She has also promised to flesh out her energy policy, notable by its absence during the election campaign.

But the New Majority is a broad church. It includes moderate Christian Democrats at one end of its spectrum and Communists at the other. Keeping them in order will not be an easy task. The two parties have already been bickering over their coalition’s stance on the crisis in Venezuela. For Ms Bachelet, winning the presidency was the easy bit.