Bachelet upholds right to tap a Communist as minister
Michelle Bachelet, Chile’s President-elect, this week rebuffed center-right politicians who cautioned her against appointing a Communist to her cabinet and spoke disparagingly about the Cuban Communist Party.
Gutenberg Martínez, former chairman of the Christian Democratic Party, said Monday (16) that if the Chilean Communist Party doesn’t make clear its position about “human rights, democracy and international politics, I believe that it would be a mistake” to have a Communist minister.
“Cuba is a permanent thorn on that issue and I think those would be very relevant details,” he said.
Senator Ignacio Walker, the current CDP chairman, also objected to a Communist Party presence in the cabinet, saying that his party does not want to “be in a joint government whose reference is the regime of the Castro brothers in Cuba or Chavism in Venezuela.”
Bachelet, 62, won the presidency on Sunday (15), on the ticket of the New Majority, a center-left coalition that includes the Communist and Socialist parties. It will be her second stay at La Moneda palace; she was Chile’s president from March 2006 to March 2010.
She is expected to announce her cabinet in mid-January and will take office in March 2014.
Appointing cabinet members “is the exclusive task of the President-elect and I’m going to perform that task fully,” Bachelet fired back at Martínez on Tuesday (17). “It will be I who defines who will be the men and women who form a future cabinet in my administration.”
She said her cabinet will be formed by “the best people for the tasks of this new political cycle in Chile.” Alluding to the coalition that brought her to the presidency, she said that “Chile always has been an example of the formation of alliances that other countries perhaps have not understood.”
Bachelet succeeds Sebastián Piñera, who won the presidency in 2009 on the center-right National Renewal coalition ticket.
In an interview with CNN en Español this week, Bachelet said that her election does not mean a turn to the left or to the right but “toward the citizens” and denied that she is a communist or a populist.
“Chile will always be Chile and the good things will continue to be done,” she said. A major task will be to defeat inequality, she said, “not only socio-economic but also toward women.” She also said that “educational reform is fundamental.”
Bachelet said she favors a new Constitution that is “democratic, participative and legitimate. We don’t want to reform it; we want a new Constitution,” she said.
Chile’s current Constitution was approved in September 1980, during the government of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. It was amended many times since then, most recently in 2010.
The cabinet of leftist President Salvador Allende (1970-1973) included three ministers who were members of the Communist Party.
