I addressed this at length in a series of posts about the Chilean election, but specifically in a preview of the runoff:

The two candidates of the right combined for 48.6% of the votes in the first round, yet their common ticket for the Chamber of Deputies could not even reach 40%!

‘Chile elects agnostic single mother as president’

Chile has elected a candidate that would have three supposed strikes against her here in the U.S. (single, female, agnostic). It appears to be a very healthy thing for Chilean democracy to produce such a non-traditional candidate.

Excellent point.

As for the pension issue, check out this article from The Economist in 1998:

Pensions paid so far by the private system may be a deceptive guide to future performance. The savings of today’s pensioners were boosted by the high investment returns of the system’s early years. But, over the past three years, the stockmarket has mostly gone downhill, lowering returns to an average of 1.8%, well below the system’s 4% benchmark. Since 1995, the average of pensions being paid has dropped.

The figures anyway conceal wide disparities. Many of today’s pensioners are people who took early retirement, because they had good pensions and could afford to. For such people, the average pension today is $312 a month. But it is only $195 for those retiring at the statutory age.

Bad news for pensioners is also bad news for the Chilean state. Its pension bill currently equals a huge 6% of GDP. That will fall as its liability to contributors in the old, unfunded public system gradually diminishes. But the original calculation that the bill would eventually drop almost to nothing now looks unrealistic.

This is 1998. It appears to have only gotten worse.

The tally this time suggested that class may have trumped gender. In some northern copper-mining regions, where union sentiment is strong and suspicion of Mr. Piñera’s wealth and support for untrammeled free-market policies also runs high, Ms. Bachelet won more than 60 percent of the vote. In more prosperous areas, her support was generally weaker among both men and women.

Perhaps true, but a quick look at Chile’s excellent electoral history website shows that incumbent President Lagos won by similar margins in those regions. Due to Chile’s odd habit of counting men’s and women’s votes separately, the same site shows us that in the last election, a majority of women voted for the right-wing candidate, whereas this year, a majority of women voted for Bachelet. This strongly suggests that, in fact, gender made the difference this year.

• In all previous legislatures, the Senate contained 38 elected seats and 10 ‘appointed’ seats, chosen in such a way to guarantee the dominance of the right. (Pinochet held a seat until 1998, as former Secretary of the Army. He was also eligible as former President.) This, combined with Chile’s odd electoral system in which one party must achieve twice the vote total of its closest opponent in a district to gain a one-seat advantage in either legislative house, has kept Chile in gridlock since the end of the dictatorship. These appointed seats also served to block any attempts at eliminating them, until last year.

Well, it’s a point being made a lot: effectively that Bachelet is the first woman in the Americas to be voted Head of State in her own right. Which is indeed quite something. Especially in what is historically one of the more conservative societies in the hemisphere—the last, for instance, to legalize divorce, only last year.

“Ms. Bachelet, a single mother who has juggled her career and the demands of raising three children ever since she entered government service little more than a decade ago, is the first woman in the region to win an election without an assist from the coattails of a more famous spouse.”