Mr Obama comes to town, part II

Somewhat belatedly, here's a column I wrote last week on the speech that Barack Obama gave in Santiago. Billed as a new Alliance for Progress, the policy Obama outlined was little more than a rehashing of existing policy towards the region.

The most substantial change, in my view, was an insistence on partnership, rather than US leadership. The American president quite rightly recognizes that it is difficult to claim political, economic, and moral leadership when his country is in such political, economic and moral trouble. When many Latin American countries are in better fiscal shape than the US, when the US dollar is losing value against commodity-inflated economies, when the level of political discourse in the United States seems to fall to Latin American levels of animosity and populism, the US begins to look like just another country in the hemisphere.

Still, there is a place for US leadership and the region continues to look to the United States. Obama would be foolish to overplay his hand in this regard. As Libya shows, President Obama tends to shirk his global responsibilities until it becomes absolutely necessary, for fear of being labelled an imperialist. He should worry less about what his Harvard classmates and Michael Moore might say, and worry more about promoting democracy and helping those who fight for it.
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Mr. Obama comes to town

I don't even want to think about what traffic will be like tomorrow. The visit of anAmerican president always implies a major security operation, which means that downtown Santiago will be a mess.

The visit of an American president also lways implies some national soul searching. Is his visit a slap on the back for the current Chilean administration, or a comment on Chile's place in the world? What kind of activities will there be for the president, and for his family? Are they appropriate? Are the guests invited to the official dinner the right ones? What is the exact nature of the nuclear agreement signed? Will Obama comment on sticky subjects like the Mapuches? Will he be fed over-antibioticized salmon?

It seems that one place to start contemplating the 22-hour blitz-visit is reading the interview Obama granted El Mercurio.
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It ain't the economy, stupid

An Adimark poll released last week showed that the Piñera government's support has not fallen, but seems to have stabilized in the low forties. This suggests two things -- first, that the high point a few months back was really a bit of a honeymoon based on the dramatic rescue of the 33 miners, and second, that for all its antics, its spending, its support in the media, the government has been unable to win new support. The right maintains 40-45% of the vote, which is pretty much the percentage Pinochet achieved in 1988. In this respect, the numbers are not so interesting.

Except that they come at a time of falling unemployment and high growth rates. Go to any restaurant, any mall, and people are busy buying flat screen TVs, iPads and new cars. It is estimated that 200,000 new cars were introduced to Santiago roads last year. And most of them are driving to work at the same time as me.

So what's going on? One possibility is that people are adjusting their expectations. That's what this latest poll shows. They were hoping for change, and got more of the same. Americans might be able to relate. Unlike the US, however, about 70% of those polled say that the previous administration -- Michelle Bachelet's -- was better. This will drive President Piñera bonkers.

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The Unbearable Lightness of Van Rysselberghe

Summer is always one, long, slow news day. Which is why minor stories often get blown way out of proportion. The US shark attacks of the summer of 2001 are a good example. But this summer, video tape of the former mayor of Concepción, and current intendant of the same region, Jaqueline Van Rysselberghe, appeared in which she admits to having invented stories in order to obtain funds from the government. The government’s mishandling of the case has meant that it has been THE story of the summer.

The Concertación has threatened to present a constitutional challenge to Van Rysselberghe’s position. Up to today, this has seemed a weak strategy, almost a tit-for-tat for occasions when the right did the same to its ministers, most notably, Yasna Provoste. But today the government announced it was standing by Van Rysselberghe, arguing that the lies are only a minor misdemeanor. It is to be assumed that the opposition will now go ahead with the constitutional challenge.

Observers tend to explain the government’s long delay, and now the defense, in terms of Van Rysselberghe’s very strong regional support and the support her party, the UDI, has demanded of the government.

My take is slightly different. Sebastian Piñera’s strategy all along has been to weaken, and eventually destroy the hard right, which is mostly found within the UDI. If he manages to do so, he creates a new centre-right, almost the equivalent of a right-wing version of the Concertación, which would then occupy the middle ground in Chile as the Concertación meanders leftwards, and can therefore stay in power for many years. By defending Van Rysselberghe, he is showing the world, one again, who is in the UDI and charging a very high price from the UDI, the details of which should become apparent in the future.

Most people think the UDI owns the government. As of today, it’s the other way around.

Cabinet Shuffle

Sebastián Piñera resisted carrying out a cabinet shuffle for as long as he could. But in recent weeks a protest against the easing of gas subsidies in the southern region of Magallanes has turned into a cuasi-revolt, making the position of the energy minister unsustainable. The transport minister, and the defense minister were also booted; the former for not doing enough to improve Transantiago (how many ministers has Transantiago claimed?), and the latter for continually shooting off his mouth in most inappropriate ways.

So over the weekend, the president replaced all three, asking current media darling Laurence Golborne to take on an additional ministry (energy), and inviting two long-time collaborators and rivals to leave the Senate and enter cabinet. In my view, the cabinet shuffle was insufficient (there are a few more who should have been shown the door, meaning that another change will have to ocurr over the course of 2011). But it also accomplishes several other things, which I summarise here.
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Regulequegate

The Concertación is so removed from the public imagination that even a major embarrassment like the resignation of the director of the National Daycare System (JUNJI), after declaring that her US$7000 a month salary was kind of paltry (reguleque), did not provide it with any sort of public relations windfall.

Yesterday I wrote a piece on the misguided discussion the Concertación is having. Rather than thinking seriously about how to reclaim the political centre, it is flirting with what could be called the flotsam of the left -- all the bits and pieces floating around and looking for a place to land. I compare the strategy with President Obama's recent success in passing lame-duck legislation, which was only possible by compromising on several points. In other words, he moved to the centre.

Meanwhile, back in Chile, Piñera is becoming increasingly adept at claiming the centre. If the Concertación does not change its strategy, it will all but guarantee that the Alianza wins again in three years.
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Blue Moon

A lunar eclipse was observed in many places around the world last night, including Chile. Coinciding with the solstice (summer or winter, depending on your point of view/geography), I suspect that a Roman or Egyptian soothsayer would have reached some kind of conclusion, positive or negative, regarding the year to come. Or the year just ended.

In fact, in modern times we do something similar. Every year at around this time year-end reviews begin to appear. The Economist published a much-awaited (at least by geeks like me) The World In..... issue, which does its best to reduce predictions to political responsible generalities.

In Chile, we are not immune to this festival of nostalgia/divination. And if we look at the year that is ending, by most accounts, the Chilean versions of these analyses will conclude that 2010 was pretty awful. It began in January with the second round of the presidential election (which, depending on one's point of view, was either fantastic or awful, although these days it is hard to find anyone who will admit to it having been an awful result). Then came the earthquake, the World Cup, the miners' accident, the Bicentenary, the miners' rescue, the prison fire and resulting deaths. In between, the usual noise caused by the President's 21 May speech, the Teletón, and other yearly rituals.

Chileans do not tend to look on the bright side, but one could. The earthquake was far less lethal than it could have been, and Santiago suffered relatively little (downside: the reconstruction has been slow and inefficient, resulting in this week's political dogfight between the government and the opposition). The World Cup was a much needed release from the seismic tension of the preceding months (downside: Chile discovered the genius of Bielsa, turned him into the biggest Argentine national hero since San Martin, and then due to politics and in-fighting, managed to lose him). The mining disaster, or rather, rescue, was a PR bonanza for Chile and its government (downside: no one remembers the miners, and much less the issue of workplace safety). The Bicentenary was muted and classy, not an ostentatious and expensive show (downside: it was a missed opportunity for an imaginative, nation-wide project in the arts, in infrastructure, in something that would last). The prison fire has no upside.

All this hyperactivity on the national scene has given both government and opposition some breathing space. The Concertación has tried to regroup, but it has a long way to go, and bets are still off on whether it will actually survive in its current form. And the government has got away with a series of mistakes whilst the (favourable) press looked the other way.

Meanwhile the economy, buoyed by the high price of copper and Chileans replacing their earthquake-affected TVs, zoomed right along. The (favourable) media ignores the possibility of Dutch disease, of the economy overheating, of the total lack of creativity in terms of development policy, of the creeping privatisation of (what's left of public) health care and education, and fiscal deficits (Bachelet had deficits to finance one of the world's largest (in relative terms) stimulus packages; not to finance spending with 5.5% growth rates).

Since Chileans are drowning their sorrows in consumer spending, they do not seem particularly gloomy. But they are exhausted. Comments on Twitter are all about hoping that 2010 ends soon. One person wondered whether it would be possible to just slice the last two weeks off the year and get it over with. So even though last night's moon was red, the year in Chile really ends with a colour much closer to blue
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