The president of Chile, Gabriel Boric, and his fellow travelers, as he himself calls them, have had everything at once: success and, since they lead the Government, the first great failures. The overwhelming defeat of the rejection in the constitutional referendum held last September 4 precipitated a change of Cabinet. A usual movement for a government that needs oxygen, but that in the case of Boric reached epic doses of pain. “It had to hurt and it hurts, but it is necessary,” he said as he announced the names of those he had decided to sacrifice at the small table of power. On the list was his friend Giorgio Jackson, considered an alter ego of the president, and also Izkia Siches, the Minister of the Interior, a star of the golden generation who had entered La Moneda like a storm last March. Both of the president’s age, companions of a thousand battles during the time of the student revolts, now gave way to two figures of traditional politics, 20 years older and with a past full of high positions: Carolina Tohá and Ana Lya Uriarte.
Izkia Siches had been, to a large extent, the architect of Boric’s victory in the second round in December last year. His tours of the country by bus and lifting his newborn baby added to the president a number of votes difficult to count. His star was placed in the Ministry of the Interior, which in Chile is equivalent to a chief of ministers. In a few months, he had gone from directing the Medical Association, from where he launched ruthless criticism of President Sebastián Piñera’s management of the pandemic, to being the second most powerful person in the Executive.
Siches debuted with a different style – one of the first photos that went up on the networks was expressing milk in her office in La Moneda – and also with big mistakes: she traveled to the conflict zone in La Araucanía and was received with an attack, which which revealed a style that was at least inattentive to the seriousness of the situation. Later, she made accusations in Congress against the previous Administration that turned out to be false. She was unable to take the reins neither of political leadership nor of order and security, two key tasks of that ministry. In her environment, they consider that the minister was unable to transfer her critical capacity, demonstrated during her time at the Medical College, to management on the ground. On Tuesday, Siches was finally replaced by Carolina Tohá, a center-left leader close to two former presidents, Ricardo Lagos and Michelle Bachelet.
There was a second key change: the president removed Jackson from his first ring of power and, although he did not remove him from the Cabinet, he installed him in the Ministry of Social Development, a second-tier portfolio. He will surely continue to influence, but not from a visible place. Jackson was in charge of the relationship between the Executive Branch and Parliament. His tough, unsympathetic style wasn’t quite up to the task. An official who knows him closely referred to his “cold heart” as a difficult problem to solve. He is also blamed for the decision to tie the government’s management to the fate of the constituent process. The defeat of approval in the plebiscite finally dragged Boric to the bottom of a slope that will be difficult to overcome.
For former President Lagos, the reformulation of the Cabinet has, first, a pragmatic explanation. Boric “wants to be accompanied by people who already know the state apparatus well and who know which buttons to push and which ones to not push. And there he looked for more experienced people in previous governments, because nobody is born knowing, ”he says. But he points to a second issue: “I think President Boric understood that perhaps, beyond the will to do, a calmer path and slightly different characteristics are required. Boric is understanding that gradualness is important to give legitimacy to profound changes”.
At the Cabinet change ceremony on Tuesday, Izkia Siches wept on Boric’s shoulder with great emotion, in a scene that had not been seen in the Palacio de La Moneda in the recent past. Noam Titelman, one of the founders of the Broad Front, of the same generation as Boric and of those who came with him to La Moneda, very close to the president, tries to explain what happened at the polls on Sunday and talks about an original problem: “ A certain left thought that being from the left had guaranteed popular support and no, it turns out that many times that people is much more complex and diverse than a single ideology. like he said [el diputado español] Íñigo Errejón a few years ago, sometimes the left has to learn to love itself less and that people more”.
Titelman, an economist, also refers to the defeat at the polls a week ago. “The president himself said it at the cabinet change: this has probably been the greatest political failure of a generation that in the last 10 years had achieved many electoral successes. He knew very well how to win elections and now it is his turn to know how to lose them”.
The generation dispute
The electoral result and the arrival in the Cabinet of figures such as Tohá and Uriarte are also evidence of a surrender. Boric campaigned ranting against the generation of the democratic transition, the one that was grouped around the successive Concertación governments. For Titelman, “the time has come to bury, once and for all, the generational dispute that has poisoned a large part of the discussions on the left and the center-left in the last decade, which, beyond legitimate differences, is a dispute of the elite, oblivious to the demands of a society that is interested in the constituent process or issues of security and public order, beyond the year in which this or that representative was born”.
“It has been a very accelerated process,” recalled the lawyer Constanza Schonhaut, an important leader of Boric’s Broad Front, who served as conventional to draft a new Constitution, at the beginning of the Government. “It’s a bit dizzying to see it backwards. How everything happened so quickly and how we were a generation that built very quickly, very conscientiously: with a lot of responsibility for the path we wanted to trace. And we are tracing that path. With hope and a historical weight on our shoulders”, described Schonhaut, a member of Boric’s party, Social Convergence, and part of the narrow circle of the president-elect. She spoke of a politically “orphaned” generation -that did not feel represented by politicians and their way of exercising public life- that was “self-forming and co-forming”. “We were building from the mistake and the success,” commented the lawyer in March.
Boric will remain in La Moneda in the company of Camila Vallejo, the communist minister who remained as spokesperson, and the Minister for Women, Antonia Orellana, who is active in Social Convergence, like Boric. But the political arm of the Government changed hands with the arrival of Tohá and Uriarte. The economy will continue under the wing of a renowned 62-year-old socialist leader, Mario Marcel.
The youth thing has been an issue that Boric and his fellow travelers have had to refer to on many occasions. During the campaign, the official candidate for the presidency, Sebastián Sichel, criticized him for his lack of vital experiences, such as fatherhood (neither Boric nor Jackson have children, unlike Siches and Vallejo, who have a daughter, respectively). “Being president is more than being a university leader, a lot of experience is required. It is required to have led something other than politics, not to have been only a deputy in life, to have vital experiences; I am a father”, assured the ex-minister of Piñera. Boric himself, before running for La Moneda, had referred to the matter of experience: “I lack experience and knowledge,” he assured in December 2020 on television, when the possibility of being on the presidential ballot seemed distant.
Boric and his people took charge of the theme and took as an anthem an iconic song by the Argentine León Gieco, The Salieris of Charly. “They say that youth do not have enough experience to govern / Luckily, they never have it / Experience of stealing / Luckily, they never have it / Experience of lying”, says the theme of the famous singer-songwriter, who had encounters with a president that, in just six months, he had to dramatically redesign his bet in search, precisely, of greater experience.
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