The Chilean Right in power: Piñera's election victory and prospects

Sebastian Piñera has been elected as Chile’s next president. For the first time since democracy returned in 1989 the Right has finally managed to win a majority share in a vote for the executive. Alongside the expected internal criticism within the centre-left Concertación coalition and demands for the heads of the Christian Democrat and Socialist parties to resign, questions will be asked about the ability of the centre-right Alianza coalition parties to work together in Congress with an ideologically similar president.

Piñera and the Right have been getting closer to electoral victory has been some time coming. Following first round defeats in 1989 and 1993, the Right was able to compete in head-to-head elections with the Concertación in second round run-offs in 2000, 2006 and 2010 (although this was also due to the challenge mounted by the extra-parliamentary left that was able to take votes off the Concertación in the first round as well).

But what already seems to be overlooked in the Chilean media is the narrow nature of Piñera’s victory, with abstentions and electoral registration having possibly played a part. Since 1989 both figures have been in decline, with yesterday’s poll the lowest yet with around 87% of voters voting and 67.5% of the voting age population registered respectively. In 1989 the turnout was 94.5% and fell to 91.3% in 1993; 88.5% of the electorate was registered in that year as well.

The fall in voting turnout and registered voters reflects growing public disillusion with the Concertación-dominated government of the past two decades. The coalition will therefore no doubt spend the next few months reviewing why that is and how they might re-engage with the public.  The education and Transsantiago protests and demonstrations during the last presidency demonstrated the extent to which it was disconnected.

But while they do that they might also spare a thought for the last time that Chilean politics took such an electoral re-direction – then to the Left. Following the highly turbulent 1960s and deep antipathy between the Left, Centre and Right, Salvador Allende’s election as president in 1970 was achieved with a similarly low turnout of 83.7%. In the years that followed until the 1973 coup, opponents claimed that Allende did not have a sufficient mandate and failed to represent the population sufficiently.

One can only wonder whether Piñera will be given the same yardstick. On one hand, while he doesn’t have a majority in Congress, power is skewed towards the executive. On the other hand, Piñera’s public support is volatile; voters weren’t pro-Piñera but rather pro-change as the 20.1% share of the vote won by ex-Socialist deputy, Marco-Enríquez Ominami demonstrated in last month’s first round. Moreover there are a number of veto players who may play an obstructive role outside of the political system, including the trade unions.

(For more on Latin America, visit the Ideas Centre's website here)

Barack Obama's Nobel Prize: A Debate

Barack Obama's award of the Nobel Peace Prize, with nominations having closed just a month into his Presidential term, has raised eyebrows. Here a number of Contributors discuss the award. Why was it made, and is it deserved? What’s the political thinking behind it? How will affect Obama’s ability to pursue his foreign policy objectives? What will be reaction domestically?

Arne Westad - This is a Nobel for good intentions rather than for achievements, Since Obama had been in office for all of a week and a half when the deadline for nominations ran out (on 1 February), it is obviously the promise of Obama that is being rewarded. In this sense it is probably first and foremost intended as a prize to the Americans for having had the courage to elect him. But it is hard to claim that the prize is going to the one who has done most for the cause of peace over the past year.

Nick Kitchen - It's hard to see that this can be a Nobel Prize 'for' anything - whilst the committee can always make decision after the end of nominations and do not have to draw solely from the official list of nominees, what exactly is Barack Obama supposed to have actually done to merit the award?

Nigel Ashton - This is the Nobel Prize for hope. You can't make a case that Obama has achieved anything yet in terms of ending the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq or Israel/Palestine. It's also the Nobel Prize for not being George Bush.

George Lawson - The Nobel Foundation has had its fair share of odd moments. In its time, it has nominated Stalin and Mussolini, ignored Churchill and Ghandi and given the peace prize to Henry Kissinger and Theodore Roosevelt, neither of whom can exactly be regarded as peaceniks. Awarding the prize to a president who, by his own admission, has barely even started to make an impact on the world stage is right up there amongst the committee's quirkiest decisions.

Danny Quah - I think the Global Financial Crisis and the trillions of dollars the international community committed to global rescue has thrown into disarray all semblance of calm, reasoned, longer-term thinking in anything but the hard sciences [in which I would include Physiology or Medicine] and, paradoxically, the higher, more abstract realms of thinking [Literature]. In between - Peace, Economics - everyone has been only grabbing at straws and even, perhaps with hindsight years from now, decisions that might eventually turn out to be wise will right now seem knee-jerk and unthinking.

Mick Cox - Am I the only one who thinks it may have been a very good idea to have awarded President Obama the Nobel Peace Prize? We can of course twitter on about it being too premature and all that. However. we do need to remind ourselves why he may have been considered fit for the peace prize. After all, in less than a year, Obama has talked seriously about nuclear disarmament, made a real effort to overcome the divide between the West and the Moslem world, done something to restore the peace process in the Middle East, kept open some line of communication to the Iranians when urged not to, got rid of a provocative Ballistic Missile system in Europe, tried to defrost the US relationship with Russia, moved quickly to maintain good relations with China, led enthusiastically on global warming, made evident his desire to seek some new deal with Cuba, and stressed the need for the United States to work with and through the UN. Indeed, in his speech to the UN he even defined security in ways that should have warmed the cockles of every cosmopolitan and world society heart. So what is so bizarre about the decision?

NK - Perhaps the fact that on each of these issues any 'progress' is at best encouraging first steps. Even on Guantanamo, the key 'peace'-related pledge of the campaign, is not closed yet, and the practice has proved more difficult than the good intentions.

NA - Probably the most bizarre element of the announcement was the emphasis placed on Obama's supposed quest to rid the world of nuclear weapons. This part of his agenda isn't even supposed to be achievable.

Charlotte Armah - When I first heard of the award - I was surprised. 'So soon?' I thought and then I smiled as I realised that I had tacitly accepted that he was a contender and was just quibbling over the timing. Even John Bolton's whinge is not that Obama was awarded the Prize, but that it seems to go to Democratic US presidents! So what exactly is the issue here? That Obama was awarded the prize at all or that he has been awarded the prize so early into his presidency that he has not had time to achieve anything significantly concrete to deserve the award?

AW - Certainly within the United States, there is the danger of the Peace Prize being seen as Norway’s way of rewarding liberal US leaders just for being liberal.

NK - The Right are going to have a field day: for the listeners of Limbaugh the only thing worse than a liberal is a liberal who's feted by Europeans.

GL - But you can see where the decision is coming from. It has hardly been a vintage year for peace. The world is a mess and Obama, for many people, is its best hope. There is going to be little progress in the Middle East, Afghanistan or any other global hotspot without active engagement from the US government. And undeniably, the president and his advisers have been nothing if not active over the past few months. However, initiatives don't always yield outcomes and it is not yet clear whether Obama's presidency will succeed, or offer a 21st century rerun of the Carter administration, another occasion when a relatively inexperienced president scored high on hope, but low on delivery.

AW - It's certainly a sign of how oriented towards US affairs the Nobel Committee is. It's easier to encourage someone of promise and power than rewarding those who take risks for the cause of peace and human rights – say, Chinese dissidents or Iraqi critics of the occupation

DQ - The first thought I had when I saw the blogosphere reaction to the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate was, Thank goodness, this takes the heat off Economics - nothing that happens Monday will be worse than what's just happened with Peace. My second thought was, Well, actually, maybe not. I figure that this only rounds up a terrible year since September 2008. The various Nobel Committees here should have just called the whole thing off this year - stopped early for lunch and quietly gone home.

MC - There have certainly been odder - and less defensible - decisions made by the "Committee" in the past. What about Woodrow Wilson (who loved the Old South and opposed racial equality)? Menachem Begin (a terrorist in some people's opinion), Mother Terrsa (who seemed to loved other people's poverty while hating condoms)? And of course, dear Henry K. the man who gave so many green lights to so many horrible regimes and dictators in the Third World that one wonders why he was never arraigned for crimes against humanity.

DQ - I don't discount the reaction from the wired masses - even if I reserve the right to disagree with them. They are literate and numerous (the ones I read, anyway), and the integrated weight of their judgement is, after all, the coalface where both peace and social science scratch global reality. But I thought most telling in all the lamenting and complaining on Obama's being awarded the Prize, I have heard no strong well-defined, anywhere close to a majority, statement of the kind "It should have been X instead." The controversy surrounding Obama's being awarded the Prize is not that his actions have taken the world forwards in some people's eyes, and backwards in others. That we could live with, and indeed, it is that that has formed the controversy in all previous Laureates. In this case, however, the controversy, if you want to call it that, is that there has been yet either no action or no result. The difficulty is there was no one else the Nobel Committee could have turned to instead to award their Prize. In these circumstances, the Nobel Committee should have just shut down for the year.

NK - It's certainly an odd assumption to make that the world merits an annual award of this nature - the absence of standout candidates shouldn't mean we plump for potential.

CA - I'm not an academic or an IR expert so I can't debate whether there have been worthier winners or if someone more deserving was overlooked. I agree with Danny that it's very telling that the outcry is not 'It should have gone to .............. fill in the blank.'I would point to the fact that there is almost no international issue in which the transformational impact of positive US engagement is not considered a critical success factor - whether it's Iran, Korea, Afghanistan, Pakistan, nuclear proliferation, the Middle East peace process, climate change, or the global economic and financial crises.

GL - In truth, awarding the prize to Obama is likely to have little substantive effect on the prospects for peaceful change around the world. Far more important will be what goes on beneath the surface of these global celebrity contests - in the nitty gritty of debates in Washington, Tehran, Moscow and elsewhere. But that is not really the point. The prize is a symbol, partly given it must be said, out of fear that things could get worse before they get better. Just as his failure to swing crucial IOC votes to Chicago's unsuccessful Olympic bid did not destroy - or even significantly dent - Obama's appeal abroad, the award of the Nobel Prize is likely to end up as a minor footnote on a busy presidency. Obama can afford to win - or lose - the world's beauty pageants. But there are other, much thornier, aspects of world politics where he cannot afford to fail.

MC - That's right: moreover, if we were to be real purists, then why fetishize the prize at all? Set up by a Swede who made a fortune from wars - perhaps we should be arguing against the prize in toto rather than against specific individuals who have won it. So let's not join the hue and cry. Lots of people have already attacked the decision including some sympathetic to Obama himself. But many have not - including a very large number of people with the least power and influence who, rightly or wrongly, see Obama not as an American but as a symbol of hope in a world where there isn't much of that commodity going around right now.

CA - We all saw the way the US presidential campaign captured international imagination - who would have thought that the French (the French, for God's sake) would be clamouring to meet a black US president! These are unprecedented times on just about any level we can think of - and in Obama, we currently have an international leader of the superpower that has this incredible impact on people. When was the last time we saw world leaders jostling each other to have their picture taken with the US president or seasoned, hard bitten journalists using their camera phones to take pictures for themselves after they'd taken pictures for their newspaper or magazine? We can sit and debate whether or not Obama is a worthy winner, or if this impact will last and all sorts of logic. Sometimes, we just analyse too much. And sometimes it's as simple and as complex as needing hope and finding it in a single individual. Maybe, it's not a bad thing for him to have received an award so early in his Presidency that reminds him, it's not just the hopes of the American people he carries on his shoulders.

NK - This may however be exactly the kind of thing that creates domestic barriers to the achievement of those hopes. A good deal of the American people resent being constantly called upon to be the world's saviour and punish Presidents who value international acclaim over America's domestic priorities or national interest. In that sense, the Nobel committee, in seeking to encourage the early intitiatives of the Obama administration, may have created a rod for the President's back.

Update on Honduras from Central America:

In recent days several things have become clearer about the recent coup in Honduras, and its effects are being felt around the region.

 

Firstly, there is a significant difference between the story being sold around the world by the mainstream media, and that which is being relayed in Central America via local radio stations in Honduras, and local journalists who are still managing to report on the situation in the country. On the day when another 3 people have been reportedly murdered by the illegal regime, this information gap is more than interesting.

 

A quick look at the ‘western’ media indicates that Zelaya was indeed overthrown, but he provoked this coup by carrying out policies he wasn’t elected for, pushing for re-election through a ‘popular survey’, and allying his government with the arch-villains of the region, Cuba and Venezuela.

 

Some critical analysis and context for the situation in Honduras:

Firstly, in the region there are several governments with shaky claims to democracy and the rule of law – Mexico, where it has been conveniently forgotten, the second major electoral fraud in 20 years was carried out in 2006. A series of irregularities led to the right-wing candidate winning by 0.64%, hundreds of thousands demonstrated on the streets, and an alternative government existed for a while, but the international media was at the time obsessing about the ‘orange revolution’ in Ukraine, and this outrageous fraud conveniently passed into history. Colombia, where Alvaro Uribe, at the head of a regime that has seen thousands of politically motivated murders and disappearances, has also been making efforts to alter the constitution to allow his own re-election, partly motivated by fears of a Fujimori-esque end to his political career. In Costa Rica, President Oscar Arias was himself only re-elected after the constitutional court ruled void the legislation outlawing re-election, in rather murky circumstances. In Peru, Alan Garcia has just overseen the brutal repression of indigenous demonstrations, which have seen him add at least 100 lives to his already macabre CV. Surely Zelaya’s sins pale in comparison?

 

His main crime appears to have been the non-binding vote on the constituent assembly, which has been used as the pretext for the coup. This vote, if it won, would have opened the path to calling a constituent assembly, which could not have been held before Zelaya had already left office, given that his term finishes in November. Thus any re-election would take place in at least 4 years time, hardly the mark of a megalomaniac. The real desire for the constituent assembly came from the need to reform a constitution that was written in the shadow of military dictatorship, and thus blocked significant social reforms.

 

The policies he began to carry out were part of his promises to bring economic growth and change. This programme was stymied when the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the US government offered only moderate sums of aid in response to Zelaya’s appeal, sums which were doubled by ALBA. ALBA further guaranteed Honduran fuel supplies for the next decades, allowing a measure of long-term economic stability. This turn to ALBA, was followed by assistance in social programmes and by an increasing political alignment with the ALBA countries. This alliance was further bolstered by the economic failure of the 2006 FTA signed with the US, which has seen the Honduran exports dwarfed by imports causing rising unemployment, especially in agriculture, as NAFTA did in Mexico. The poverty gap has widened, and it is this that President Zelaya was trying to tackle, by adopting measures that threatened the future of the FTA.

 

Here we have the clues for the curious involvement of the US in this crisis. Honduras under Zelaya became an ally of the ALBA, and thus a political enemy of US pushed neo-liberal economic policies, which coincidentally took the world into the current economic crisis. He also threatened US economic interests, since joining ALBA was incompatible with any FTA.

 

What is the evidence of US involvement? Well, the US government has admitted that representatives were in talks with the plotters for a week before it took place, ‘trying to find another way’ out of the situation. Furthermore, the appearance of several people linked to past and present administrations points towards a deeper involvement.

 

Just in the month before the coup a civic democratic forum was formed from a variety of Honduran ‘civil society’ organisations, many of which received funds from the $50 million dollars that USAID and the nefarious Reagan-founded NED distribute each year. Just this year the International Republican Institute, part of the NED, received 1.2 million dollars to use in Honduras. This Civic Democratic Forum immediately declared that the coup had ‘saved democracy’ in Honduras. This recipe is similar to that followed in ‘colour revolutions’ in Eastern Europe and to the functions of opposition groups in Venezuela and Bolivia.

 

Furthermore, a series of the State Department actors in this crisis have links to US policy areas characterised by overt and covert hostility. The current US ambassador, Hugo Llorens - a Cuban exile - was formerly in charge of the Andean Affairs section of the NSC, and as such, was reporting to Otto Reich and Bush during the 2002 coup against Chavez in Venezuela. He joins a series of other ambassadorial appointments in Central America, which include people linked to US Intelligence (Nicaragua), the campaign against Cuba (El Salvador), and support of the Venezuelan opposition (Guatemala). There is also a strong pro-putchist lobby in the US, headed by John McCain and the Cormac Group, which brought a delegation from the junta to Washington to meet Congressmen and Senators.

 

Lastly there is a military element to this crisis. The Honduran constitution does not allow foreign bases on national soil, and yet the US has had an installation in Soto Cano since the 1950s, headquarters of Joint Task Force-B, which has about 500 men and several aircraft at its disposal. Zelaya, incidentally, had decided to open the airport to civilian air traffic, which would seriously affect the bases military functions. Then there are the large numbers of officers trained in the School of the Americas and its successors, with two of the putschist generals having attended the School.

 

All of this points towards a more active US role in events in Honduras than has been recognised in the English speaking media, and also helps explain the US inaction over the coup. Although there have been references to the coup, and to the ‘restitution of constitutional order’ there has been no official characteristation of the coup as such, as this would necessitate the immediate cutting of military and economic aid to Honduras, and beginning active measures against the putschists.

 

What next?

For the putschists, the future to a large extent depends on the US attitude towards their government. If economic sanctions are applied, it will rapidly force them to step down. They also face significant social mobilisation, which they cannot respond to with overwhelming force, without forcing the US government’s hand. However, without using force, the social mobilisation may well grow and become uncontrollable. None of its neighbours can afford to close the border for long, and the 3 day closure last week reputedly cost the region some 200 million dollars in lost revenue, but how long can the business sectors allied to the coup withstand the economic disruption being caused by road blockades and strikes?

 

Their hope must be that the regime will be able to stagger along until the elections in November. If these pass without major disruption and can be internationally verified somehow, then it is foreseeable that the US and its closest allies would be able to recognise the new government, without seeming to have backed the coup.

 

This outcome will become impossible if Zelaya manages to enter Honduras, and become the focal point for popular resistance to the coup. However, it is yet to be seen whether Zelaya has the courage to do this, considering the personal risk it entails. But a Zelaya in prison, or dead would make it nigh on impossible for the regime to claim any legitimacy, and this is why the actions of the deposed president will to a large extent determine the outcome of the crisis.