Weekly Report - 15 September 2011 (WR-11-37)

The four months of protests by school and university students in Chile are finally starting to reshape the political arrangements which have been in place for the past 20 years. The first sign that the neat parcelling-up of political power between the Left and the Right could not last, came in the 2009 presidential election campaign when Marco Enríquez Ominami, a dissident socialist deputy, challenged Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, a former president, for the right to take-on the rightwing candidate, Sebastián Piñera in the decisive second round of the presidential elections. Enríquez Ominami failed, but his challenge has eventually forced the four parties of the Concertación, the left-of-centre alliance which ruled Chile from 1990 to 2010, to rethink the Concertación’s role. Given the imploding opinion poll ratings of the President Piñera, how the Concertación decides to reform itself will have major implications.