If last year’s national convulsion wasn’t enough to break up Chile’s romance with market-friendly technocracy, the spreading civic choler over the miseries brought on by the coronavirus pandemic may finish the job.

Yes, President Sebastian Pinera’s speedy measures to combat the outbreak and pump the economy with emergency funds for the most vulnerable households gave the besieged government a breather. Yet the recent 95 to 36 vote by the Lower House to allow Chileans to raid their private pensions was a rebuke to fiscal parsimony and more broadly to Pinera’s faith in capitalist reformism.

It’s not the statue-toppling moment of which woke Chileans may have dreamed. Even if the bill, a constitutional amendment, clears the Senate by the required 60% supermajority, depositors may withdraw only 10% of their savings (up to around $5,500). But to gauge by the jubilation in the legislative chambers and the street, Chileans might have won the World Cup.

The thrill is unlikely to last. The economy fell by more than 15% in the 12 months to May, and analysts project a 6% to 7% contraction of gross domestic product this year.

The burden falls unevenly on one of the region’s most unequal societies, where last year’s wave of outrage nearly brought the Pinera government to its knees. One of the triggers of last year’s turmoil was pensions, the marquee policy of Latin America’s most business-friendly nation.

Chile pioneered enterprise retirement funds, becoming in 1981 the first country to forsake a government backed pay-as-you-go pension system for mandatory private retirement savings.

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