MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Piñera willing to lead opposition in bringing right-wing back to power

Former Chilean President Sebastián Piñera 'not retired'.

He also criticised the Bachelet administration for making too many mistakes, creating hostile atmosphere and not making their programs known beforehand

 Former Chilean President Sebastian Piñera pledged Sunday to lead the right-wing opposition back to power in 2017. “No doubt about it; I'm not retired,” he said, but he added that “starting a campaign at this point would be ”unaesthetic,“ said the businessman who bacame the head of state between 2010 and 2014.

According to Piñera, the conservatives have a chance to return to power and that possibility is ”more open than ever,“ because the current government [of President Michelle Bachelet] is making too many mistakes,” namely applying “old fashioned and outdated statism as if it was a true religion.”

He also blamed the current administration for creating a hostile atmosphere which is very “harmful not only to the economy but for life in society as well” and recalled that poverty went up in Chile during Bachelet's first presidency between 2006 and 2010.

Analysts agree that the levels of stagnation which hit Bachelet's Chile now started to develop under Piñera, when GDP dropped from 5.6 percent in 2012 to 4.1 percent in 2013 with a forecast for 2014 of 1.8 percent and a slight recovery to between 2.5 and 3.5 for 2015.

Piñera downplayed the importance of the right-wing's defeat at the last elections which happened, he explained, because the true nature of Bachelet's reform programs were not made public. In his view, the education reform entails the “loss of the possibility to choose on the education of your children” and the tax reform would bring “the economy to a sudden deceleration”.

He deemed it important that the right-wing understands that it needs to offer the country a “big project of future” on the basis of three fundamental values - liberty, equality and progress and called on the Christian Democrats to be loyal to their principles or stay in the New Majority governing coalition “which is dominated by the left-wing.”.

He regretted not having listened more carefully to his constituence which is where the heaviest criticism stemmed from. He went on to explain that in his view the right thing to do was to nominate a presidential candidate by late 2016 or early 2017. “I'm not retired and I'm worried about what happens with Chile; It runs in my DNA,” he said.