Debating Chile

I am back from LASA, which I really enjoyed, and I’ll be doing several posts on it. My Chile/Bachelet panel produced a good discussion—the theme coming out of the papers was the nature of political consensus in the country. Looking at a number of different areas, the argument was generally that a) the “consensus” refers to a relatively small number of political and economic elites, and streets demonstrations are composed of those who do not feel part of it; b) since the economic model is a central part of the consensus, any major policy changes would entail changing the model (at least to some degree); and c) that Bachelet has not been willing to challenge it.

Subsequently there was discussion about whether the Concertación (Bachelet or anyone else) was even capable of enacting substantive change. After having been in power for 17 years, the Concertación has embraced the economic model and so it can hardly even be really called “pinochetista” anymore. Any Concertación president would have to start fighting her/his own coalition to dismantle any part of it.

Finally, there was a question about whether the disparate opposition movements could come together to put significant pressure on the government. At this point, there are no strong horizontal linkages, but some thought there might more than in the past. Very hard to tell.