Gabriel Boric is the new president of Chile. The 35-year-old leader of the Apruebo Dignidad coalition, after defeating Republican Jose Antonio Kast , will take the place of outgoing president Sebastian Pinera in La Moneda.
A clear victory, that of the Chilean progressive front, which on the night of the presidential ballot collected 56% of the votes, sharpening the gap with the Frente Social Cristiano. The 15 million Chileans called to the polls had been placed before two clearly different political offers: on the one hand, a political agenda characterized by social demands, the fight against climate change (remember the proposal to block a copper mine), the strengthening of welfare state, the construction of a new social state and a tax for the “super-rich”, on the other hand an ambiguous political leadership, imprudent in evoking the era of Augusto Pinochet’s military coup and the consequential neoliberal recipes, and in the proximity to Jair Bolsonaro .
Camillo Robertini
Although the latest center-right executive was considered an experimental center of ultraliberalism, despite Apruebo Dignidad encompasses the range of the left in all its nuances, from the Christian left to the Communist party, the Chilean middle-class has chosen to trust the millennial Gabriel Boric.
On the street, the people return to chant “El Pueblo Unido Jamas Sera Vencido”, the new president inaugurates his triumph in the indigenous language of the Mapuche, borrowing the speech of Salvador Allende and urging their constituents to “go home with the healthy joy of clear victory obtained “.
But it would be biased and unfair to reduce the electoral outcome to a dispute between those nostalgic for the “Allendian past” and those who have poured their trust in Kast, a descendant of a German family who emigrated to Chile at the end of the Second World War, as well as the brother of Miguel Kast , director of the Central Bank of Chile under the military dictatorship of Pinochet. Of course, the candidacies of Boric and Kast were so antithetical that the attempt to provide a deeper analysis seemed almost useless. The answer seems to be at hand. However, political processes and electoral rulings deserve a “panoramic view”, capable of reading new scenarios through the microscope of history, linking ancient outbreaks to “new fires” (such as Estallido Social). We talk about it with Professor Camillo Robertini , researcher at the Institute of International Studies of the University of Chile. Professor Robertini, what are the factors and conditions that determined the success of Apruebo Dignidad
What was Chile before Boric’s victory
We must place the historic result of these elections within a process of political radicalization and a series of social protests that have rocked Chile from 2019 onwards.
The knots of a system that for years has excluded a part of the population from civilian life in the country have come to a head. The motto of those riots was “not for the 30 cents, but for the 30 years”. From the beginning, the riots have turned the spotlight on a central problem in the political and social dynamics of contemporary Chile; or that that country, considered by many to be the oasis of Latin America, as the most developed center in terms of technological innovation, of financialization of the economy, was a reality in which the transition from dictatorship to democracy had been absolutely bland, unresolved.
Thus, the political legacy of Pinochet and the Chicago Boys was still standing. Let me give you an example: since the coup of ’73 Chile has chosen a neoliberal model, sanctioned and protected by a constitution, that of 1980, which had established a fundamental principle: that of the subordinate state. A state that cannot have a voice in the economic and social life of Chileans, run by technocrats and ultraliberals. At a certain point this system, in which pensions, education, health had been entrusted to private welfare systems, came into crisis. So, returning to the symbolic phrase of 2019, it is not the 30 cents increase in the cost of the subway that has caused the social question to explode in Chile,What happened
The Chilean dictatorship existed from 1973 to 1990, and this difficult “transicion” did not have the tools to modify the distortions of the previous system. With the constitution of 1980, ratified through a scam referendum (because there were no electoral lists, so the voters could express themselves several times), Pinochet officially became the president of Chile. After the transition, despite the dictator handing over the presidential attributes to Aylwin of the Christian Democracy, will remain chief of staff of the armed forces for years, and the distortions of the military regime will continue to persist.
This situation has continued over the years. Therefore, even during the center-left governments scattered throughout Latin America (Lula in Brazil, Kirchner in Argentina, Mujica in Uruguay and Correa in Ecuador) the 1980 constitution prevented, without the agreement of all political parties, the change in the status quo. This explains the origin of the social protests of 2019, characterized by unprecedented violence followed by unprecedented violence by the State, the subject of legal and historiographical debate on the problem of reactionaryism of the Chilean government.
In short, the aforementioned piece of society excluded from civil life, saw in the “just violence” the only instrument of self-determination, while the Pinera executive classified as “subversive” any demonstration against the Chilean state. During the Estallido Social, the student movement (and not only) managed to impose its own agenda, up to just before the pandemic when the Constituent Assembly was obtained to rewrite the constitutional charter.
A striking historical result, towards which the Italian press has not had much interest. The 1980 constitution was questioned, with the consequential request for the convocation of a constituent assembly elected by universal suffrage, in which gender equality and fixed representation quotas for indigenous peoples are recognized, and through which it is possible to redesign the framework of the new Chilean state. One of the biggest challenges for the new government concerns the structural reformulation of the state in a pluri-national sense.
Obviously, this will attract enormous resistance from certain sectors of Chilean society that consider themselves dominant. In short, what was Chile before Boric
Quite simply, the striking example of the neoliberal theories that have contributed to the explosion of social inequalities. What Chile will be with Boric
We remember that Chile is a country where there is 3% of the population living in the tres comunas, the richest neighborhoods of Santiago, we are talking about a per capita GDP that exceeds that of the center of Milan or of Rome, and the rest of the population receives a salary not exceeding 500 dollars a month. Although a reformist constitution is approved, the times to implement it are very long, the problems of public order and the squares that accompanied Boric’s victory will once again protest in the face of a much more complex reality.Today, Chile turns left. The political scenario presents a radical bipolarity, in which two well-defined poles (nationalist and socialist) and the disappearance of the moderates are distinguished. The settlement of Boric will have substantial consequences on this set-up
. Excellent question. In the sense that the recent Chilean elections testify to two elements: first of all the end of the political scheme where the center left and the center right are complementary to each other and substantially equivalent in terms of economic and social policies, and secondly the rise of polarization. The latter is part of a wider phenomenon, which starts from the Estallido Social and continues with the pandemic.
Bipolarism has created a new “angry” right. That of Pinera was certainly a nostalgic right of “pinochettism”, but it had a technocratic, liberal character, with the typical traits of Western conservatism. The failure of the previous executive produced the figure of Kast, an integral part of the establishment of the military regime. On the other hand, the center left of the “consertacion” was a coalition that had lost the relationship with its own bases, with the real country. An agglomeration of intellectuals, professionals, middle classes and that 5% of the Chilean population that can be considered wealthy, but distant from the inhabitants of the slums.
We can say that polarization and social protests have led to the birth of new organizations and new movements that have emptied the classical left. Apruebo Dignidad comes out of the movement of universities, 2011-2012, when Boric was leader of the student union. While Kast’s right presents a Trumpian, Bolsonarian matrix, which envisaged the image of a Chile on the brink of civil war and the emergence of a new Unidad Popular, Boric’s radical and post-ideological left change the substantial problems of the country, a redefinition of the current scenario; a left out of the old political categories, capable of identifying and concluding compromises with the Chilean Christian Democracy in the run-off phase.Tell us about the potential influences that the new government will be able to exert on the Latin American context, and the role that the continent can play on the international level.
Since 2015 we have witnessed the advance of the right in Latin America, liberals, pseudo-parafascists, such as that of Bolsonaro, of Mauricio Macri in Argentina and that of Pinera in Chile. Compactly, the Latin American continent had embarked on the path of conservation, delivering keys to the central bank and obsequiously following the rules of the market. Rules that from a European point of view are not in the least mitigated by clear criteria, such as respect for transparency, competitiveness and consumer rights. The victory of the center-left opens up an alternative scenario, not to mention that in a few months there will be elections in Brazil, which is the real “locomotive” of the continent.
So, if we consider Mexico, Bolivia, Argentina which still has a progressive government, Chile in that context can play an important role. Obviously, one of the great open questions of Latin America and that of national fragmentation, that is, all experiments like Mercosur, are cold fusion unable to give a single voice. Therefore, weakened by the covid, by the exponential public debt, by the inflationary processes of Argentina and Brazil, the continent is once again the merchandise of the great powers. The advance of China is particularly worrying from the point of view of investments and megastructures. Let us recall the African case. In its role as a small reality, Chile will be able to make its own contribution on a symbolic level.
Gabriel Boric will take office in March, and in two years the new constitution will have to be approved or rejected in a constitutional referendum. The new president has two years ahead of him in which he will have to accompany the constituent process and at the same time during which, due to the sensational advance of the ultra-right in the Senate, he will not have an organic majority. Two years of substantial stagnation, where the rhetoric of words prevails over facts. But starting with the new constitution, a huge construction site will open, a space where you can plan the transformation of the country.
Although, as the markets show, Boric’s victory has already caused an earthquake in the Chilean economy which, like the rest of Latin American countries, depends on raw materials. Chile is linked to the export of lithium and copper, Argentina to that of soy and meat. Any government that wants to change things must take into account two invariable macroeconomic elements. A bad year, a fall in the price of copper, a famine in the countryside… can change the economic direction of the nation. Boric’s triumph awakened social forces that were weakened during Pinera’s mandate. What interests revolve around the political line of the new President who promised to open the doors of the Moneda to popular demands
How much “Chavezian” populism contaminates the direction of the former barricadero
Di Chaveziano is only the rhetoric of Kast, who established an imaginative dichotomy between the pinochettist order and the so-called “Venezuela fireplace”, namely the fact that the Boric’s entry into the Moneda would have represented a return to the disastrous times of the Unidad Popular, which for a part of the Chilean middle class means a shortage of food and luxury products. So, during the electoral campaign Boric was forced to affirm that Maduro’s is a dictatorship, therefore it is clear that Boric will not be able to move the diplomatic line of Chile and other countries on Venezuela.
But there are two factors that make Chile an atypical country in the context. The first concerns its bureaucracy; a well-trained and very strong official that is unlikely to be shaped by the new political guidelines. On the other hand, the current center-left wishes to distance itself from the bankrupt Madurian model. Chile was the country, thanks to the statements of Pinera, which welcomed the highest number of Venezuelans, and is the one that most intends to move away from that context.
Finally, Boric will surely have months of symbolic declarations and it will be difficult to get out of the impasse. Faced with the possibility of modifying the substantial reality it will be easier to modify the symbolic reality.
