Source: The Nation
The story of how Chile, in the decades after its 1973 coup and death of democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende, became one of the most neoliberal societies on the planet is well known. But there’s been a remarkable reversal over the last few years. Chile’s current president, Michelle Bachelet, less than a year into her second, non-consecutive term, is advancing an ambitious legislative agenda, related to voting, education, labor, same-sex civil unions, abortion and the environment.
But she is doing it—or able to do it—only because she is being pushed from below. Chile, long held up as a model of “free market” orthodoxy, has become a different kind of example. It’s become model of intersectionality on the march: social movements, students, environmentalist, worker, LGBT—have not only scored concrete victories, they are showing that it is possible to de-neoliberalize policy and resocialize consciousness.
Before the details, take a second to consider the chronology of Chile’s political history since Augusto Pinochet, who seized power in 1973, stepped down as formal head of state in 1990. For twenty years, between 1990 and 2010, Chile was led by a series of democratically elected Concertación governments, a center-left political coalition that simultaneously consolidated (and legitimated) Pinochet’s neoliberal economic model while gradually working to democratize society.