A LONG dictatorship ended in a negotiated transition to democracy. The centre-left took office with a moderate programme, reassured the right by pursuing pro-market economic policies, added better social provision and reconnected the country to the world. Power later switched to the right, which persuaded the country that it had become democratic. Then the centre-left returned, this time as a new generation critical of the compromises of the transition. It veered further left but faced economic difficulties.

Spain? Yes. But Chile, too. Since the dictatorships of Generals Franco and Pinochet, politics in the two countries has run along uncannily parallel tracks, with Chile lagging Spain by ten to 15 years. In Spain, Felipe González, the Socialist prime minister in 1982-96, laid the foundations of democracy, combining liberal economic reforms with a new welfare state and leading the country into Europe. When José María Aznar of the conservative People’s Party (PP) took over, he continued many of Mr González’s policies. Then the Socialists returned under José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who confronted the right through progressive social reforms (such as abortion and gay marriage) and by approving a Law of Historical Memory, an implicit criticism of the amnesty agreed during the transition.

Spain’s transition served as an example for democrats in Chile, where the centre-left Concertación coalition governed in the mould of Mr González from 1990 onwards (though with a more timid increase in public spending and welfare provision). In 2010, with Pinochet dead and discredited by his indictment for human-rights abuses by a Spanish judge, Sebastián Piñera, a billionaire businessman, won power for the centre-right. Like Mr Aznar, he followed policies similar to his predecessor’s. Then in 2014 Michelle Bachelet, who in her first term governed for the Concertación as a moderate, came back determined, like Mr Zapatero, to shake up the transition settlement, though in a different way. She has tried to push through reforms of tax, education, labour, pensions and the electoral system, as well as a new constitution, with the aim of replacing “the model” bequeathed by the dictatorship. One of her allies called this deploying a “retroexcavadora” (backhoe loader) against this legacy.

In Spain, Mr Zapatero’s government was overwhelmed by the euro crisis, which spawned Podemos, a new far-left party. The crisis, and then the left’s divisions, have delivered successive election victories for Mariano Rajoy and the PP. Chile has not suffered anything as dramatic. But the economy has grown sluggishly since 2014, partly because of the uncertainty caused by Ms Bachelet’s reforms, many of which have been clumsily handled.

Does the Chilean centre-left, now called the New Majority, face a Spanish future of division and defeat? The main credential of its likely candidate in a presidential election in November, Alejandro Guillier, is his past as a television anchorman. Although a senator since 2014, he comes over as a new face who is not part of a political class that, as in Spain, has been discredited by scandals. His ideas seem vague: he has both presented himself as a moderate and called for “rupture” with the present. Some on the centre-left call him a populist. Above all, he seems to stand for a continuation of Ms Bachelet’s model-breaking approach.

That may not help him. She is unpopular. Mr Guillier may also face rivals within the New Majority: the Christian Democrats may run their own candidate. A stronger far-left, akin to Podemos, has emerged from student protests in 2011.

With seven months to go, the election is still open, but it looks like Mr Piñera’s to lose. That seems to be the view of Ricardo Lagos, the most successful of the Concertación presidents. At the age of 79, he sought the support of the Socialist Party only to be snubbed in favour of Mr Guillier. In announcing his withdrawal this month he warned of the “strategic dispersion” of progressive forces” and a “conservative…restoration that could last many years”.

In Chile, as in Spain, the transition ushered in the most successful period in the country’s history, with greater prosperity and social progress. In both cases the centre-left began to go astray when it ceased to believe in its own success. That is not to deny that both countries have now moved on, and that both have new problems that need solving. Chile needs better public services and environmental regulation, less abuse by monopolies and a less unequal society. That amounts to improving “the model” rather than replacing it on ideological grounds. The job may well fall to Mr Piñera.