Bachelet, unlike Rousseff, tries to grasp the nettle
Pushed against the ropes, Chile’s President Michelle Bachelet has come out swinging, replacing her most senior cabinet ministers, announcing plans for a constitutional reform and rushing out an anti-corruption initiative. Bachelet could never have predicted such a precipitate fall in popularity, to just 29%, barely a year after taking office with an emphatic 62% of the vote to secure a second term. Bachelet’s proactive response stands in stark contrast, however, to that of Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff, who is suffering a similar fate – a sharp decline in popularity in the wake of a serious corruption scandal and being beset by economic and political difficulties – but has looked paralysed.
President Bachelet’s approval rating fell nine percentage points to 29% in the latest survey by Chile’s most prestigious polling firm, Centro de Estudios Públicos (CEP), down nine percentage points on the previous CEP poll last November and far lower than anything she experienced during her first term in power (2006-2010). Bachelet’s disapproval rating jumped to 56%, up 13 points. Crime was adjudged to be the principal public concern on 46%, followed by health on 45% and education on 40%, but the fastest-growing concern was corruption, which climbed 19 points on the previous poll to 28%. This, in a country which regularly tops a regionalised table of the annual corruption perceptions index (CPI) compiled by the Berlin-based NGO Transparency International.