LIKE the rest of South America, Chile has been badly hit by the end of the commodities boom. But it has also gone further than most of its neighbours in adjusting to a harsher world. The peso has depreciated by around 45% since January 2013, helping to extinguish a big current-account deficit. Low debt and years of macroeconomic rigour mean the government has been able to run an expansionary fiscal policy while the Central Bank’s interest rate, despite an increase this month, is negative in real terms.

And yet economic recovery remains elusive. Most forecasters think growth this year will be barely more than last year’s anaemic 1.9%. Next year looks only slightly better. Investment continues to fall. This, then, is no longer the Chile that was Latin America’s model economy, growing at a steady clip of 5%.

For that, supporters of Michelle Bachelet, the Socialist president, blame the outside world. The price of copper, Chile’s main export, has almost halved since 2011, causing mining firms to slash investment. The government’s critics point to the uncertainty caused by Ms Bachelet’s programme of radical reforms which, they say, is destroying the Chilean “model” and the incentive to invest. So far the government’s explanation is more plausible: growth rates in free-market Peru have halved, too. But the longer the slowdown lasts, the stronger is the opposition’s argument. Chile faces a real risk of losing its way, and for that history may ascribe most of the blame to Ms Bachelet herself.

She swept to power in 2013 with 62% of the vote on the most left-wing programme since the 1970s, aimed at reducing inequality. It was a critique of the Chilean model—free-market economics combined with gradually expanded social provision—adopted by the centre-left governments (including her first administration in 2006-10) which ruled for two decades from the end of the Pinochet dictatorship. She pushed through controversial reforms of tax, education and the electoral system in her first year in office; another bill gives more rights to trade unions.

Two things threw her off course. The first was the economic slowdown. The second was a scandal, to which she was slow to react, in which her son appeared to use his influence to obtain a $10m loan for a business deal. The president’s approval rating has plummeted, to around 25%. And the reforms themselves are unpopular. She has sounded the retreat. In May she brought in as finance minster Rodrigo Valdés, a moderate who is respected by business. He says he plans to “simplify” the tax reform, and will partially restore an investment credit. The government is modifying the union bill, to balance rights for workers with flexibility for business.

Nicolás Eyzaguirre, one of Ms Bachelet’s closest aides, admitted recently to El Mercurio, a conservative newspaper, that the government tried to do too much: “we’d clearly got ourselves into a maelstrom of reforms that we were not going to be capable of either designing appropriately or processing politically.”

Ms Bachelet calls the change of tack “realism without resignation”—the Spanish sin renuncia meaning both that she will not resign (as some had speculated) and that she will not resile from her programme. That phrase is worryingly contradictory. She is pressing ahead with the biggest change of all, a new constitution (the current one, though much reformed, was drawn up under Pinochet). On October 13th she announced a drawn-out timetable by which the government will send a draft to Congress in 2017, but it will only be the next Congress, from 2018, that decides on the mechanism to approve it.

Polls show that a majority of Chileans favour a new constitution. But it is not an issue they care about deeply—Ms Bachelet tacitly admitted as much by ordering a six-month “civic education” campaign. At least her plan respects the existing institutions. But it will do nothing to reassure investors. “Chile needs a constitutional reform now, and not a process of uncertainty that will last for years,” complained Sebastián Piñera, who was the centre-right president in 2010-14.

Chile’s clannish business lobbies are wrong to oppose all change. To carry on growing the country needs better education, better public services, more competitive markets, more meritocracy and less privilege. The most telling critique of Ms Bachelet’s programme comes from the wiser heads on her own side. They warned her that her reforms were technically botched. And they told her that what Chileans care about most is the lack of equality of opportunity and social mobility—the chance to share in the “model” rather than to abolish it, as she has flirted with doing. They were right.