Chile decides its future after an explosion, a pandemic and a constituent assembly

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Chile, the once Latin American “oasis”, has been jumping from convulsion to convulsion for two years, a spiral of unrest that will live a new chapter this Sunday with the crucial presidential elections between the religious conservative José Antonio Kast and the far-leftist Gabriel Boric.

Gone are the days when Chile was admired for its socio-political stability and economic prosperity: in the last two years, the country has lived through a social crisis unparalleled since the dictatorship, a pandemic that has wreaked health and economic havoc and a constituent process that could dismantle the current economic model.

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Sunday’s elections, the most uncertain and tense since the return to democracy, do not seem, however, to immediately return the country to its former path of tranquility.

“Chile is condemned to a mess, I see it difficult for us to get out of this, although I think Boric is less incendiary than Kast,” Margarita Valdes, a middle-aged woman who runs a small fruit stand in the capital, told Efe.

Her stall neighbor, Valentina Valdés, still does not know for whom she will vote on Sunday -like 20% of the more than 15 million Chileans who are called to the polls-, but she assures that “it has been many years since there was so much interest in the streets for an election”.

OPPOSITE POLES

Kast and Boric, 55 and 35 years old, respectively, are like water and oil and defend two opposed country models. The conservative, who won the first round with 27.9% of the votes, defends the economic legacy of the military dictatorship (1973-1990) and supports the values of the traditional right-wing: homeland, family, and order.

He calls “violentistas” the thousands of demonstrators who, since October 18, 2019, filled the streets in the most significant wave of anti-government protests since the return to democracy, which left with about thirty dead and thousands injured, in addition to episodes of extreme violence are looting and arson.

And he promises to restore “peace” to the country and strengthen the reviled Carabineros police force, which has been accused of human rights violations by organizations such as the United Nations and Amnesty International.

“Two years ago, a bug was raised that said ‘Chile woke up’. Chile at that time did not wake up, it entered a nightmare where the rights of millions of Chileans were violated. Chile will wake up this Sunday when it recovers all its capacities to defend freedom”, he assured this week.

The former left student leader, on the contrary, defends the social demands expressed in the revolts in favor of better essential services and wants to implement a welfare state similar to the European one, with an ecologist, feminist and regionalist accent.

“I am going to vote for Kast not because I like him but because Boric scares me. He’s a nice guy, but he has little experience, and I don’t think he can contain prices,” cab driver Christian Ramos told Efe, referring to the very high inflation that in November reached almost 7% year-on-year, a figure not seen since 2008.

Despite the enormous differences between the candidates, Julieta Suárez-Cao, of the Catholic University believes that “the polarization is asymmetrical since only one of the sides is slanted”.

“The extreme left in Chile is insignificant, it does not even have parliamentary representation. It is the extreme right that strains the system, very similar to what happened in the United States with Donald Trump,” the political scientist explained to Efe.

UNGOVERNABILITY?

For Kenneth Bunker, director of the pollster Tresquintos, “both Boric and Kast are going to have many problems to govern, but perhaps more so Boric, who has many more promises on the table and many people believe that he could give them the solution to their problems”.

However, Mauricio Morales, from the University of Talca, said that “Boric is in better conditions to heal and close wounds with respect to Kast”.

But for that, he added, “he must be intelligent enough to expand his government coalition to the maximum, including the traditional parties of the center-left”, which governed from the end of the dictatorship until 2010.

The future Chilean president, who will head the most left-wing government since the overthrown socialist Salvador Allende (1970-1973) or the most right-wing since Pinochet, will have to deal with a very fragmented Parliament and a democratically elected convention that is drafting a new Constitution.

The constituent process was born precisely as the institutional solution found by the political forces to quell the marches and will foreseeably culminate in mid-2022 when a referendum is called to ratify the new Fundamental Laws.

Morales considers that it will be then when Chile can “return to the path of stability”, but he warned that it would not be possible to achieve this goal.