Former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet is likely to win the Dec 15 runoff election by a landslide, and the conventional wisdom is that her new coalition, which includes the Communist Party, will make a sharp turn to the left. But the conventional wisdom may be wrong.
Here are five reasons why Bachelet may come back to the presidency with a more leftist rhetoric, and perhaps closer ties with authoritarian populist governments of Argentina, Bolivia and Venezuela, but without departing from Chile’s pro-market economic policies or its economic alliance with Peru, Colombia and México.
First, Bachelet won by nearly 47 per cent in last Sunday’s first-round election, short of the more than 50 per cent she would have
