The former president of Chile Sebastián Piñera has died: a right-wing democrat who knew how to dialogue and build majorities to govern

“He was a Democrat from the start”. Thus President Gabriel Boric greeted on the national network, with heartfelt and profound words, Sebastián Piñera, born in Santiago in 1949 and died yesterday in a tragic accident in Lake Ranco, in southern Chile.

Sebastián Piñera was a former president, former senator and businessman who lived life intensely. Those close to him describe that behind the executive image, sometimes disconnected from emotions and accelerated by the former president, lived a happy man, who did not know resentment and personally cared for his surroundings.

History will tell that Piñera was by far the most important right-wing politician of the last fifty years in Chile, if not more. A man who understood the most basic of laws of politics: Power requires majorities to govern.

In 1980, at the height of protests against dictator Augusto Pinochet and his proposed Constitution, a young Piñera was one of thousands who gathered at the Caupolicán Theater to listen to former president Frei Montalva. For many it may have seemed obvious, because his family was Christian Democratsbut intrinsically Piñera knew that his vision of economic and social integration had much more in common with the sectors that supported Pinochet than with those that opposed him.

In 1988 he doubled his bet. He marked the vote for “No” to Pinochet and participated in the campaign against the regime. And the following year, now in a democracy, he assumed the electoral leadership of the right-wing candidate, where his affections really lay.

He was elected senator for Santiago, but for years many in the corridors distrusted him. “He is a Christian Democrat”, “It’s not really right wing”said the members of the Independent Democratic Union, a party with which they have always had greater tensions and which represents the most conservative sectors of the Chilean right.

That dispute with UDI had its final blow in mid-2005, when he decided to accept the candidacy for President of the Republic and compete with the hitherto undisputed leader of the sector, Joaquín Lavín. Piñera won in the first round and then lost to Michelle Bachelet.

In 2009, life brought him the long-awaited revenge. With support that transcended the historical boundaries of the right, thanks to the convening and dialogue profile that it was tasked with cultivating, the right has finally built the majority needed to come to power. And at that moment, the attributes that already made him a very successful businessman, but which had not yet been put to the test in politics, appeared: quick, reckless decisions and competitiveness.

They say he was dull, but he was something else: his stubbornness is the flip side of his success. They told him no, he went and he did it. That’s why he won so much, and when he failed, he failed miserably.

He won when he saved the Atacama miners despite all the advice of his advisors who asked him not to risk political capital in a quest with little chance of success. He won when many told him that his plan to rebuild Chile after the 2010 earthquake was impractical. For the first he toured the world showing the role of his success, with the second his reconstruction plan came to be studied in the most prestigious universities in the world.

He also won when he hid the speech from one of his closest advisors, the conservative Cristián Larroulet, and has decided to include equal marriage as the first announcement on its public account. Three of the most important laws on sexual and gender diversity in Chile bear his signature, due to his majoritarian vocation and the need to broaden the horizons of conservatism in his sector.

won when has become the undisputed international leader in vaccination rates and protection against Covid, because as soon as he found out about the virus he went to negotiate with the laboratories to be first in line. Once again, his entrepreneurial skills led him to catapult part of his legacy.

And he won when, certain that he had not violated human rights as they accused him, he himself called international organizations to submit to their examination. The United Nations and Human Rights Watch intervened, None of them credited systematic human rights violations attributable to him or his direct command.. These reports were the basis of defense for the prosecution of the International Criminal Court to refuse to bring any action against him.

But he also lost. He lost when, amid the smoke of the barricades and the chaos of the city, he stated that the country was at war against a powerful enemy. He didn’t say what it was about and a significant part of the population felt attacked. A divorce from which he has never recovered and which only in the last year, in a sort of vindication of his inheritance, seems to have begun to be repaired. In the latest polls, the late president’s positive image has returned to the levels that landed him twice in the Palacio de La Moneda.

In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the coup, Boric himself, who during the campaign had “warned” him that he would be persecuted for reports of human rights violations during the epidemic, He made a gesture acknowledging that for him he was “a democrat”.the same words he used yesterday to refer to his farewell.

Sebastián Piñera lived with intensity and made risky decisions. Yesterday, according to his testimony, when he began to feel ill and lost control of the helicopter, he managed to stabilize the plane and ask his loved ones to jump. Then he rushed over. He leaves true to how he lived.