Chilean President Sebastian Pinera has renewed his political right to oust him from the tyranny of Augusto Pinochet, but the social crisis of 2019 will tarnish his image and leave him in power.
The 71-year-old billionaire leader, who could not be re-elected in Sunday’s vote, has twice won a non-consecutive mandate.
His second term, which ends in March, has been plagued by the coronavirus epidemic.
But he was convicted of social unrest and fraud in a Senate rejection on Tuesday and was forced to decide on an impeachment bid.
Axel Callis, an election analyst, told AFP that “the next morning of the social uprising, the Pinera government came to a political and influential end.”
Pinera’s first attempt to quell protests against social injustice was at best a failure.
Pinera, a wealthy businessman who saw the country’s economic, political, and institutional injustices as a sign of war, and his early decision to send in troops were devastating.
He soon described Chile as a “buddha” in Latin America because of its strong economic and political stability.
Two weeks later, two million Chileans took to the streets to demand a change in their neoliberal style.
Unprecedented protests allowed parliament to hold a referendum on amending the dictatorship’s constitution, and a year later the overwhelming majority (78 percent) supported the change.
Pinera, who did not propose or support the move, once again lost contact with those he led.
“What has happened is a change in the axis of power,” Callis said.
“Somehow the parliamentary system was set up without proper institutions – Chile is a presidential system – and everything related to politics began to happen in parliament.”
The executive is trapped in the back seat, and Pinera is “no longer a valuable, strategic or important actor.”
The decline of popularity
The plague did not occur in more severe cases.
Chile is proud of its rapid introduction of the vaccine – 90 percent of the country’s 19 million eligible people are fully immunized – and the government’s delay in distributing aid has prevented Pinera from regaining public confidence.
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His family members are suspected of having a conflict of interest in the sale of the mine to a close friend, and are rarely included in Pandora’s documents, which ended in a tax haven.
The Senate has banned opposition attempts to impeach Pinera, but she remains the subject of a fraud investigation.
Five months before the end of his term, Pinera’s popularity fell to a record low of 12 percent, from 50 percent at the end of his first term in 2014.
The economist, who graduated from Harvard University in 2010, convinced voters that his personal success in business could be transferred to the public good, according to Forbes magazine in 2018, when Pineras had an investment of $ 2.8 billion.
He was able to bring back to power a reformed right wing that had been freed from the burden of Pinochet’s dictatorship.
During his first term in office, he called the dictator’s civil defenders “passive accomplices” and closed a special prison for human rights abusers.
“Pinera wanted to represent the modern, democratic right wing,” Claudia Hayes, a professor of political science at the University of Chile, told AFP.
He called for “an end to the transition to democracy” and “an end to the divisions created by the dictatorial regime.”
But his second mandate left him in an “uncertain position” when it “rolled between two versions” of democracy, especially when the constitution was changed.
“He was never very clear … he never wanted to say whether he was for or against changing the constitution,” Hayes said.
He said the fence seat had weakened the right wing and helped lift the far-right presidential candidate, Jose Antonio Cast, a fierce critic of Pinera.
According to opinion polls, Cast Pinera’s candidate Sebastian Sichel will not be able to run in the second round.
In any case, the damage to Chile’s right wing under Piner led to the election of left-wing candidate Gabriel Boric.