MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Chile: Final Mistake

Andrés Allamand

The Concertación’s leaders don’t understand the country they helped create.
By Andrés Allamand

When the history of the present campaign is written, not much will need to be said about Eduardo Frei’s campaign strategy. Two words will do: it stank. And one number: 29.6%, the worst result of any presidential candidate in Concertación history and more than of a million votes less than Sebastián Piñera.

The campaign’s reaction after the first-round vote didn’t surprise anyone: we saw the biggest migration of central government personnel to a Concertación campaign on record. Michelle Bachelet’s spokeswoman and the government’s media czar took over the equivalent posts in Frei’s headquarters. And just so there was no doubt about who was running the show, the undersecretary of Regional Development, Mahmud Aleuy —the Concertación’s archetypal political operator who in his old post gave away 50 billion pesos this year just as he liked — became the campaign’s executive secretary. (Of that $50 billion, 7,500 million was allocated to create jobs; there’s no evidence the money was used as the law specified.)

But there was a surprise in strategy. The marching orders the campaign embraced came from (Christian Democrat politician) Gutenberg Martínez: to win we must “polarize the election to the maximum.” Such a plan reflects something simple but deep: the Concertación’s leaders — whose dismissal was called for in the “deafening boos” of Frei’s supporters when the leaders gathered to launch his second-round campaign —don’t know how to read the country they helped create.

Polarize an election in which almost 80% of the voters approve of President Bachelet and yet half of them vote for a candidate not of her party? Polarize an election at the end of a government whose most important reforms — pensions, public safety, education, and the creation of an environmental ministry — were all passed unanimously, in formal agreement with the opposition? Polarize an election by reviving past hatreds when the immense majority of Chileans want to look forward?

Frei’s campaign strategists make the mistake of not understanding that Chile today is a mature democracy. In this democracy, citizens don’t want one group always in power, but rather an open playing field where all groups complete.

They reject executive meddling in campaigns and public money being used to pressure people. They don’t take orders from party leaders and reject dirty campaigning. They know when a political party has lost its way, grown exhausted, and been stymied by infighting over who leads it.

In a mature democracy, popularity can’t be transferred from one politician to another. The citizens judge candidates and their campaigns on their own merit. Finally, in such a democracy last-minute “mea culpas” cut no ice. Even less — despite what some strategists like to think — do fleeting coalitions based on opportunism and mudslinging.

There is no polarization in this election. You only need to choose between Eduardo Frei, who was president 15 years ago and left office with the worst approval ratings of any leader since Pinochet, who is hostage to the Concertación’s leaders, and who only wants to revive the fights of yesteryear, and Sebastián Piñera, who represents the future and a government of national unity, professionalism, and the people’s will.

Frei is past policy and nostalgia. Piñera is the future and hope.

Source: La Tercera - Translation by Bill Stott - Santiago Times

(*) Allamand is a founder of the centre-right Renovación National Party, another of whose founders, Sebastián Piñera, is the presidential candidate of the Coalition for Change, a partnership of the RN and the far-right UDI parties.

As a young lawyer, Allamand had a lead role in negotiating Chile’s return to democracy with Pinochet’s military government; he also played for the national rugby team. He is a senator from the same region as Piñera’s opponent, Christian Democrat Senator Eduardo Frei of the Concertación coalition.