Not even the best forecasts predicted such comfortable results for the Chilean ultra-right in the elections for constitutional councilors held this Sunday: the Republican Party, in favor of maintaining the current Constitution, obtained 22 seats out of the 50 at stake, becoming the party with the most votes in national level and doubling the seats to the traditional right.
“Today we can breathe a little easier,” said its leader, José Antonio Kast, who lost to President Gabriel Boric in the 2021 presidential election and is a staunch defender of the neoliberal model established by the military dictatorship (1973-1990).
It devastated most of Chile’s 16 regions, its traditional strongholds in the south, in the north, and even seized fiefdoms ruled by the left, such as the Valparaíso Region.
These 22 seats will allow him to exercise the power of veto in the constitutional body: «In this scenario, it is most likely that the Constitution that comes out of this process will not be an enabling Constitution. It is a guarantee of the status quo and the strengthening of the presidential options of the Republicans,” the director of the Faculty of Government of the University of Chile, Claudia Heiss, told EFE.
changes everything
The Republicans repeated the surprise that they already gave in the 2021 elections, when they won the first presidential round and obtained 16 parliamentarians in the legislatures (15 deputies and one senator, although three of them left the party). However, now, for the first time, they will lead the body in charge of discussing and approving a new Constitution.
“There is a distribution of power different from what we thought and that changes everything: the constitutional debate will change because the issues that are included in the Constitution and that will be important for the Government will depend on the Republican Party,” said the analyst. Kenneth Bunker of the Tech Global think tank.
Kast’s overwhelming victory completely changes the balance of forces of the new Constitutional Council against the previous Convention, dominated by progressivism and a majority of independent candidates who, unlike today’s elections, were able to run on their own lists.
For the deputy director of the Institute for Society Studies, Rodrigo Pérez, one of the keys will be whether the ultra-rightists “choose to accentuate their most vociferous side or if they establish a policy to seek allies.”
During the campaign, the Republicans lashed out strongly against the rest of the opposition, although in recent days, Kast -who left the traditional right-wing coalition in which he had been a member for more than 20 years, considering it too moderate- gave signs of wanting to bet on a style more dialogue.
After the rejection of the first constitutional proposal in September and unlike the extreme right, the traditional right opted from the beginning to resume the constituent itinerary. Now, according to analysts, the conservative coalition is weakened and at the crossroads of taking the extreme positions of the Republicans or adopting a more moderate profile of its own.
A global phenomenon?
The phenomenon of the Republican Party in Chile is not equivalent to other far-right phenomena in the world, according to Bunker, and -according to him- it corresponds more to a “dispute of factions” of the Chilean right that compete for hegemony in space.
However, for University of Chile political scientist Octavio Avendaño, there are similarities between the Chilean extreme right and their counterparts in other countries, especially in relation to issues related to insecurity and the migration crisis, although with elements from the country itself.
“The Republican Party also drinks from the consequences of the social outbreak and the prolonged economic crisis that generates uncertainty and a feeling of discomfort in a citizenry that is increasingly appealing for order and stability,” Avedaño concluded.
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