2023-05-08 03:31:00
Chile is a pendulum. Almost four years have passed since the Social Outbreak of 2019 and the irruption of the “transformative” and “refoundational” agenda of the Chilean New Left, which they tried to translate into a failed constitutional essay. A left that was born walking in student marches and managed to install one of its own in the Palacio de La Moneda, the youngest on record.
Four years later, the citizenship has given him a final slam to the package of solutions and the ideology of that New Left. And the reasons are varied, but to a large extent they fall on their own mistakes and arrogance.
These are the facts: the Chilean right obtained the best electoral result in its democratic history. Within that bloc, the most conservative positions triumphed, and by far. For his part, Gabriel Boric suffered a crushing defeat, since the ruling party was not able to reach the 21 seats necessary to have some kind of influence in the new Constitutional Council.
Let’s recap. The new left developed a profound criticism of its parents, the successful Concertación that successfully transitioned from the shadows of the Dictatorship to a bright path of democracy and social development. But to new generations, raised in new and comforts taken for granted, new expectations.
Young
The speed of consensual changes, product of a democracy of agreements, they filled the patience of the youngesta generation hyperconnected and -legitimately- more ambitious.
They managed to install a diagnosis in Chile that is still true: it is a society with enclaves of injustice that are granite, with segregated cities and a lack of protection of social rights with the standards that the country’s income should be able to guarantee.
But this diagnosis, common and broad among citizens, was followed by a battery of solutions that began to decouple systematically from the priorities of their compatriots and their national identity. We already know what history is: that intention to leave embodied, in a Constitution, the government program of the new left received an electoral beating on September 4.
Chile began there what has been called a “conservative restoration”, characteristic of changing times between reaction and restoration. Those who were silent and fearful of cancellations spoke again without fear. Those who believed that their voice was not valid, given the moral superiority built by the new generation of leaders, once again felt validated to give their opinion.
Along the way, they incubated rage and emotions, which they expressed as a true revenge slap against the new left that had become the ruling party. It is not clear if the 37% of the ultra-conservative party, the Republicans of José Antonio Kast, are really his. What is clear is that this party was chosen as instrument to deliver the message of repudiation of the recent past.
Now, if the field of emotions and revenge were not enough, that new left that took power has not been successful in managing it either. Security, immigration, economic certainties and unemployment burst onto the agenda with the force of a hurricane. All discussion frameworks in which this sector, and not only in Chile, has been unable to propose successful recipes.
That is why it is not strange that all the electoral publicity had little to do with the New Constitution. Republicans focused their speech on the need for a “strong hand” and frontal combat against organized crime, something for which a new Constitution can grant few recipes beyond the constitutional ordering of the institutions.
That is why it is not strange that accounts can be taken of the fact that these elections also had a sense of referendum on Boric’s management and his government. And if that were the case, the result is catastrophic.
The truth is that the conservative restoration in Chile is advancing hand in hand with millions of Chileans who joined in voting as a result of compulsory voting. A mass of apolitical people who got fed up with the arguments and the uncertainties that have settled in the country in recent years. Many describe them as those who classically said “it doesn’t matter who wins, tomorrow I have to work the same”. Now bound, they are the fire of restoration.
At least two big unknowns remain. The first, regarding the government and its inability to increase the base of adherence to his ideas after the plebiscite on September 4, because the right added almost the same 62% of the rejection – if not a little more.
The president will have to decide if he wants to entrench himself in his already stable 30% support, or if he is going to dispute flags his adversaries and try to connect with the popular clamor, thus renouncing his varied identity agenda, today impossible to specify.
The second is about the same right, which lives its own internal front. The center right, made up of the parties that led Piñera to the government, suffered a heavy defeat against Kast’s party. The incentives for this center right to collaborate with the government diminish, but it cannot turn too much towards the extreme either, because it runs the risk of blending in until extinction.
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