Four years after Gabriel Boric came to government representing a new left-wing political generation that had emerged just a decade earlier as part of a student movement that questioned the concertación’s politics of agreement, called for an end to profiteering, free, quality education, and a new Constitution, Chile finds itself facing an electoral process in which the concerns at stake are radically different.
At the end of 2021, when Boric was elected, the country was emerging from a social epidemic of enormous proportions and, due to a pandemic, was immersed in a constituent process in which of the 155 conventional members chosen to draft a new Constitution, only 33 were right-wing. The main topics of public conversation were social rights (pensions, education, healthcare, housing), ecological demands, the rights of women, minorities, indigenous populations and other cultural diversity. Nothing remains of all this. Today the debate focuses on security and economic growth. How to control crime, organized crime and immigration, which is directly linked to the two previous phenomena, always through punitive measures. And when it comes to increasing productivity, we have gone from the challenge of innovation and the question of how to best use our human and natural resources in these times of technological revolution, to despising any state participation and postulating deregulation without counterweights as a recipe for getting out of the swamp.
The outright rejection of the first convention’s constitutional proposal – there was a second one led by José Antonio Kast’s Republicans that was equally despised, but no one remembers that one – has put a tombstone, until further notice, on the discussion about the kind of community we should aspire to. His excesses have discredited the debate, although we agree that across the West, progressive proposals are having a terrible time. They have lost their grip, a political scientist would say; his charm, a publicist; his social affiliation, a sociologist; his credibility, any citizen.
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From the beginning of the 20th century to the present, only two strictly right-wing presidents have been democratically elected in Chile: Jorge Alessandri (1958-1964) and Sebastián Piñera (2018-2022, 2010-2014). Both businessmen and, in Piñera’s case, a rare bird in his sector, because he did not support Pinochet’s dictatorship, like everyone else did. The centre, essentially represented by the Christian Democrats, unless Popular Unity advanced, always allied itself more comfortably with the left than with the right. This is what happened before and during the concertationist period. Today that party, for decades the largest in Chile, barely exists. All recent polls agree on a clear shift of the electorate to the right. The sum of the candidates representing that sector (Kast, Kaiser and Matthei, all three of German origin) practically doubles the preferences for Jannette Jara, the candidate of the coalition of left-wing parties. They were all Pinochet supporters and only Evelyn Matthei condemned the human rights violations during the dictatorship, although her attempt to obtain the intransigent vote led her to qualify them. The other two have even expressed their willingness to forgive torturers such as Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko, sentenced to almost 1,100 years in prison for his crimes against humanity.
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It is as exaggerated and timeless to argue that these right-wing candidates threaten to dismantle democratic institutions as it is to believe that Jara, as a member of the PC, desires the dictatorship of the proletariat. Right-wing candidates, however, compete on who promises harsher measures against migrants and criminals, as if they were the same thing and, instead of people, they were scum. The level of dehumanization in the speeches is very high and sometimes the desire to demonstrate determination is confused with cruelty. Not only do they offer to close the borders, weaken them, militarize them, but also to go hunting. Their proposals, far from aspiring to tame the worst instincts to give them direction, choose to amplify them, as if understanding fears and anger consisted of staging them in a bestial way. They have unleashed a competition to prove who is tougher, more wicked, more drastic. From the debate on how to improve education we move on to how to strengthen repression. From high schools to prisons, from efforts to include the promise of marginalizing, from wanting to understand the passion to condemn. Culture, intellectuality and art had no space in these campaigns. It’s true that you don’t live on poetry, but it’s very sad to do without it.
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We’ll see what happens on Sunday. We will most likely witness the closing of a political cycle. The parties around which our recent history has orbited will end up losing their centrality. It is difficult to see unifying projects. Very few are enthusiastic in favor of any of the options. There are many who will vote against something and few who will vote for it. The majority, against the specter of communism, continuity, insecurity, uncertainty and disorder, the others against the authoritarian threat. Anger and fear are the main protagonists of these elections. Not collective projects. Also disappointment.
