After the victory of former student leader Gabriel Boric in last Sunday’s presidential elections in Chile, the country’s right has begun to question itself and is debating which way to go to recover.
With 55.8% of the vote and just 35 years old, Boric became the youngest and most voted president in Chilean history. Given this scenario, among the options considered by the right are placing former candidate José Antonio Kast, runner-up in the elections, as the main opposition leader, or looking for new faces to take the lead.
Recognizing the defeat, the candidate of the Republican Party, who received the support of the government of Sebastián Piñera, argued that “this unity around certain principles is something that must be maintained” by the right.
The Catholic lawyer won the first round in November, leaving candidate Sebastián Sichel out of the vote and fourth, but lost to Boric on Sunday by nearly 12 percentage points.
In 2019, Kast founded the Republican Party, which in November’s parliamentary elections won 14 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and one in the Senate.
“This project is not temporary”, guaranteed the politician, who was a deputy for 16 years and for two decades a militant in the UDI, the largest political formation of the four that make up the government coalition Chile Vamos.
Despite the positive results obtained in a short time, Kast began to lose support and there are already experts who predict a “fratricidal war” for the leadership of the right.
“Defeat always opens up fractures on the loser’s side, and the temptation to blame Kast exclusively is great because he lost by many votes,” said Rodrigo Pérez de Arce, a lawyer and master in Sociology from the Instituto de Estudos da Society (IES) of Chile.
In the expert’s view, the center-right had to turn twice to candidates from outside the middle “to fill the leadership vacuum”, first with an independent moderate Sichel and then with Kast.
Kast, who campaigned for values such as order, homeland and the traditional family, promised an iron fist against migration and was mainly rejected by voters in Santiago and by young people and women across the country, attracted by Boric’s promises of change.
For the doctor of Political Science and professor at the University of Talca Mauricio Morales, the right “has added up everything it could and obtained the same number of votes for the presidency as Sebastián Piñera, elected in 2017”.
Despite the obvious defeat, both experts agree that the right is not at its worst, especially compared to the wave of protests in 2019, the strongest since the military dictatorship, and the elections held in May to choose those who will participate in the drafting the country’s new constitution, when it only won 37 of the 155 disputed seats.
For her part, the expert on political and government institutions Julieta Suárez-Cao, a professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, told EFE that the right had recovered a little in the second round of the presidential elections, but that it still suffers from the effects of the protests and due to “the two souls that coexist in it: the more identity and extreme and the more social”.
The big dilemma for the right is, therefore, to remain united around Kast or to build a new narrative that connects the moderate Chileans who went to the polls.
The creation of a new coalition between the Republican Party and Chile Vamos is something that the director of the Center for Public Policy at the University of Development, Gonzalo Müller, ruled out a priori, as he believes in “peaceful coexistence and parliamentary coordination between the two” .
Senator Felipe Kast, nephew of the Republican leader and former president of Evopoli, the most central party in the Chile Vamos coalition, said this week that it’s healthy to have different right-wing parties.
In this sense, several names are being considered to lead the so-called “social right”, among them deputies Diego Paulsen, Diego Schalper and Tomás Fuentes, of the same generation as Boric.
According to Pérez de Arce, the new leadership must have territorial experience, a connection to the real Chile and a conviction of the importance of healthy reform.
For Müller, parliament is likely to become a fertile ground for new presidential candidates. This is because the left and right are almost uniformed and Chile Vamos has 54 deputies and 24 senators. According to experts, regardless of who takes control, the opposition must be “constructive and generous, but firm”.
#Chilean #seeks #directions #Borics #victory