Sebastián Piñera

Miguel Juan Sebastián Piñera Echenique OMCh (1 December 1949 – 6 February 2024) was a Chilean billionaire businessman and politician who served as the President of Chile from 2018 to 2022 and previously in 2010–2014.

• Whoever he is (that wins the presidential election) should never forget that he is going to be the president of all Chileans, not just of those who supported him.
  • Sebastián Piñera (2021) cited in: "Sebastián Piñera voted and warned: “Whoever wins, must never forget that he will be the President of all Chileans”" in Market Research Telecast, 19 December 2021.

• I met President Piñera several years ago. He always had a positive attitude towards Uruguay and me personally. As an example ... his support with the logistics offered for the arrival of vaccines during the (COVID-19) pandemic.
  • Luis Lacalle Pou (2024) cited in "Former Chilean President Sebastian Pinera killed in helicopter crash" on CNN, 7 February 2024.

• There was a strange aftertaste to many of the calls for grand social reform in 2020. As the coronavirus crisis overtook us, the left wing on both sides of the Atlantic, at least that part that had been fired up Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, was going down to defeat. The promise of a radicalized and reenergized left, organized around the idea of the Green New Deal, seemed to dissipate amidst the pandemic. It fell to governments mainly of the center and the right to meet the crisis. They were a strange assortment. Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Donald Trump in the United States experimented with denial. For them climate skepticism and virus skepticism went hand in hand. In Mexico, the notionally left-wing government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador also pursued a maverick path, refusing to take drastic action. Nationalist strongmen like Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Narendra Modi in India, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey did not deny the virus, but relied on their patriotic appeal and bullying tactics to see them through. It was the managerial centrist types who were under most pressure. Figures like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in the United States, or Sebastián Piñera in Chile, or Cyril Ramaphosa in South Africa, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, Ursula von der Leyen, and their ilk in Europe. They accepted the science. Denial was not an option. They were desperate to demonstrate that they were better than the 'populists.' To meet the crisis, very middle-of-the-road politicians ended up doing very radical things. Most of it was improvisation and compromise, but insofar as they managed to put a programmatic gloss on their responses—whether in the form of the EU's Next Generation program or Biden's Build Back Better program in 2020—it came from the repertoire of green modernization, sustainable development, and the Green New Deal.
  • Adam Tooze, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World Economy (2021)