In the latest Bicentennial survey of the Catholic University, probably the best survey in Chile, the results on trust in public and political institutions are surprising for their magnitude, and to tell the truth, they are terrifying. I want to stop at just one example: 1% of those surveyed trust Chilean political parties, and that same meager 1% of those interviewed trust Congress. If the sample of interviewees was 1,575 people, that means that of 1,575 interviewees, only 15 declared confidence in the parties and Congress. There is no doubt: between 1% and 0% there is not much margin for statistical error, which means that, without a doubt, trust in parties and Congress could well be zero. The established policy is on the ground.
Well, this established policy behaves as if survey data did not matter.
The contrast is brutal between these data of radical distrust and the type of behavior free of ties and restrictions on the part of deputies and senators. It is impressive the freedom that parliamentarians take to give their opinion on all kinds of things, blindly seeking to connect with the average voter and common sense: according to the data, without any success. Proof of this legislative liberality is observed in the discussion of one of the laws on security: the discussion on the rules of the use of force (RUF) by the Armed and Law Enforcement Forces in their function of ensuring a certain state of security. Armed peace has given rise to all kinds of inventions, from considering the gender and age of the repressed to pass bullet without contemplation, with the protection of the legislation. Two positions that extreme the problem: in this sense, they are extremist.
Another piece of evidence, in a totally different area, refers to the reasonable proposal of the Electoral Service (Servel) to hold the municipal and regional elections of October 2024 in two days, considering that Chile entered into a mandatory voting regime, which is has translated into an enormous increase in electoral participation (85% of those eligible to vote are doing so). Well, what to do when there are four votes that converge on the same day and in the same voting act? Definitely, it is not the same to vote compulsorily in a plebiscite with binary alternatives (for or against, approve or reject) as it is in four elections with dozens of candidates in two of them (municipal councilors and regional councillors): Servel measured the average voting time (the waiting time would be enormous) in an ecosystem with limited capabilities to increase the number of voting locations and the number of secret cameras in each of them. Well, in the legislative discussion on Servel’s proposal to vote in two days, legislators have engaged in an imaginative competition to resolve the dilemma. Everyone happily proposes doubling the number of voting locations (which is materially impossible, as if Servel had not thought of this possibility), as many others advocate increasing the number of secret chambers (as if the physical space available were infinite. ). Others are inclined to accept the idea of an election in two days, but placing the hypothetical second round of governors as the second day (which will not necessarily take place if a gubernatorial candidate prevails in the first round). The imagination is impressive, the ignorance too, and it is proportional to the magnitude of the distrust that deputies and senators generate in the mass electorate. Meanwhile, in the world’s largest democracy, India with its 900 million voters, voting is taking place for six weeks.
The above finds a correlation on the occasion of the processing of the short isapres law: deputies and senators, as if they enjoyed absolute freedom, get involved in niche disputes and in performances on the edge of fatal deadlines. The result is that within hours of the possibility of the system collapsing, deputies and senators are voting. A real irresponsibility.
All of the above is not only the cruel reflection of the state of party politics and parliamentary politics. It is also the reflection of a way of doing politics that is autonomous from reality, to the point of denying it.
Such is the belief that parliamentarians embody the interests of Chileans, such is the parliamentary illusion that Congress is the mirror of Chilean society, that the behavior of the indigenous people of the countryside (senators and deputies) ends up being a form of unconscious cynicism.
It is not very difficult to know where the main threat to representative democracy lies. The source of the threat does not reside in an abstract populist candidate, or in a theoretical paradigm-breaking populist party, but in the specific senators and deputies themselves: their collective behavior is truly irresponsible, in the deadlines but above all in the contents that They accompany their instructions and votes.
Chilean politics is on the ground.
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