The results are in! After a nail-biting month, Concertaci????n candidate Michelle Bachelet has won the Chilean presidential run-off election with 53.5% of the vote. It’s the fourth straight victory for the center-left coalition, and they have won a slight majority of seats in both houses of Congress as well. The opposition has conceded gracefully, people are celebrating, and no bombs are going off. All in all, a model democratic election.

It is a reward for sixteen years of reform. President Lagos is retiring with a popularity rating near 75%, and there is no reason to believe that there are any signs of slowdown. Highways are being built, shopping malls are popping up all over the place, and Chileans are now able to enjoy both the fruits and challenges of a modern society. One of the new government’s most pressing challenges will be education reform, an educated populous being essential to a stable democracy.

The system is almost entirely privatized and tuition is actually pretty cheap in relation to what people would pay in the United States. When I was younger, I attended a Chilean high school for a few months and was very impressed with the rigorousness of the curriculum. Many of the professors had doctorates in their subjects and would teach at a more grueling pace than what you’d get in a stateside university.

There are some serious problems that plague the system, however. The kids are generally out of control and disengaged, fighting and running around the room during class. I’d get back from break to the tune of a window or chair breaking. You really had to hand it to the teachers for putting up with all the nonsense. A lot of the problem is that they aren’t punished, but another is that the teaching itself is not very engaging. I slept a good 3 hours in class everyday because it was so boring. All memorization! Dates, names, and events only. No active thinking and application. However, no matter what a kid gets for grades, he still has to be able to pass the national college entrance exam, the PSU, and currently many high schoolers are unprepared for it. And this was in Las Condes, not exactly a bastion of poverty. As a result, perfectly capable kids end up not advancing as they should be.

The current system leaves many on the lower end of the economic scale behind. If there are deep problems for schools on the upper end of society, just imagine how bad it is for those on the lower rung. Many cannot afford a private education, so the burden is on the communities to educate their children. However, they don’t have near the resources to do so effectively, making the quality below sub-par. The few public schools available to the impoverished are nothing more than daycare centers for really big babies.

But when Bachelet says that she’ll fix it, I believe her. Unlike Venezuela, where state oil revenues are used simply as political leverage and welfare, Chile fights the corruption that makes this possible. It’s record high copper revenues won’t be simply used for income subsidies, it will be used to develop an education system that will pay back on its investment in prosperity for decades to come. Education reform is just one way in which Chile is heading down the right road.

Foreign news services will undoubtedly tie in that this is a sign of further consolidation of the broader populist movement toward the left on the continent. This would be a mistake. It is actually a consolidation of democracy in the country.

Chile’s electorate is much more sophisticated and stable than that of its neighbors. They don’t buy into the Bolivarian mumbo jumbo of Hugo Chavez because they’ve seen that the “neo-liberal” policies — those terrible free trade economics that he decries so — that the coalition has pursued has led to poverty being cut in half, growth of 6%, and the rise of a powerful middle class. Ask any Chilean what he considers himself to be and he will never say latino. Latino is everyone else. They are chileno first and foremost, the exception to the rule in an otherwise ungovernable region of the world.

The Socialist party that Bachelet hails from isn’t of the typical brand of socialism that we’re used to. The Socialists are actually just a partner in the greater Concertacion coalition that includes the large Christian Democrat party, the center hold of Chilean politics that has directed policy-making in the country since before the times of Salvador Allende. The Christians Democrats have a tendency to switch sides and hand electoral victories to former foes when its policy of reform is under threat. They supported Allende in 1970, Pinochet in ’73, and then turned against him in the early ’80s that in turn paved the way for democracy at the end of the decade. It is their support and policies that allows the Concertacion to win. Radicalism will not be tolerated. One day, in the eventuality that it begins to falter, they will just as easily team up with the center-right Alianza coalition to form a new government. The result is a pragmatic humanist coalition that puts practicality over ideology.

Yet Chile is one of the most conservative societies in the Western hemisphere. Almost everyone is devoutly Catholic. Abortion is totally illegal. Divorce just got the go. Only 30% of women work outside the home. Even the polling stations, astoundingly, are segregated by gender. I recall a news story from 1999 about a secretary who was fired not because of her abilities, but because she was getting too old for her boss’ tastes in looks. She was just over thirty. When she took the case to court, do you know what the judge said? “You are ugly.” Case dismissed. If you want to know the definition of machismo, you go to Chile.

Bachelet is a single mother and an avowed agnostic. While the economics will stay the same, what her victory means for Chile is a revolution of the social conscience. She is the first elected female president in Latin America’s history and has promised to make half of her cabinet women. The election is a symbol of opportunity for the opposite sex that has always been treated as not quite equal. It may not come as a surprise then that many of her new voters are rural women once generally dedicated to the far right wing of Chilean politics.

Everyone is celebrating on the streets. Banners are flying, flags are waving, and people are cheering and drinking pisco. It????????s one of the only nights you????????ll be able to party on a Sunday night in Santiago. Major change is on the horizon for Latin America’s most prosperous country. Those words are usually synonymous with disaster in this region. Not here. This is good change.

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In addition to the article, I’d like to throw this in as evidence that this is a genuine revolution that we here at Publius can support wholeheartedly. That’s right, protest babes.