Santiago – The results surprised everyone, including the winners. The ultra-conservative Republican Party swept the polls in Chile in a debacle for all the traditional political parties and left the worst possible scenario for the ruling party: a new Constitutional text that the right can write at will and where the Republicans, the party who never wanted to change the Magna Carta of the dictator Augusto Pinochet, have veto power.
Apathetic elections, marked by disinterest and disaffection that ended up shaking everyone, especially the traditional parties and the government of the leftist Gabriel Boric. The progressive Executive thus starred in the second major electoral defeat in just over a year in power, after the one that occurred in September 2022 after the rejection of the first constitutional proposal.
The elections were held in a climate of political insignificance for the electorate because they were not strictly on current and contingency issues. However, his results consolidate a clear trend in Chile to the right, the rise of the extreme right and the change of direction.
When they are still trying to understand the results of the previous electionin years marked in the country by a high turnout at the polls (nine elections from 2020 to date), the world once again turns its eyes to what is happening in Chile and wonders about the reasons for this radical change, from the effervescence of the social outbreak to the overwhelming results of the ultra-conservatives.
José Antonio Kast’s Republicans become the party with the highest percentage of votes by himself (35.41%) in recent decades and even in the history of Chile. For some analysts, like Francisco Vidal of the University of Development, it would be the second best result of a party in the country, only surpassed by the Christian Democrats with 42% in 1965.
Of the 51 seats available (50 +1 indigenous seat that was won in the vote), the Republican Party won 23: a sufficient majority to veto any new regulation. If it aligns with the 11 obtained by the Chile Seguro group, which represents the right-wing coalition of former President Sebastián Piñera, both can draft the new constitutional text together, without the need to dialogue with any other political force.
‘Mea culpa’ by Boric
President Gabriel Boric, serious, firm and correct, gave a speech at the Palacio de la Moneda on Sunday acknowledging the unappealable victory of the Republicans but also asking them “not to make the same mistake that we made” when writing a first Constitutional text partisan, where right-wing forces were deliberately excluded.
But the results leave readings on multiple levels: the failure of the popular Partido de la Gente to win seats, which collapses, but also the resounding failure of the Concertación and the Chilean center-left parties that came together in a list that did not achieve any seat and the high number of people who voted null as a form of protest (almost 17%) or blank (4.5%), a total of 21.5% and more than 2.6 million votes.
“The result is the worst of all worlds for the ruling party”, where the two lists in which they participated separately were expected to achieve at least 2/5 of the seats (21 of 50) to have veto power, he explained to France 24 Rodrigo Espinoza, director of the School of Public Administration of the Diego Portales University.
“The growth of the Republicans is quite surprising with a José Antonio Kast who ran a campaign throughout Chile very deployed in the territory and based on contingent problems, which was quite effective,” he points out.
an empty center
“The government was expected to come out second”, but not such an overwhelming republican victory, but more of the traditional right, that already speaks of tensions and changes within the opposition, analyzes Julieta Suárez-Cao, professor of Political Science. from the Catholic University.
The academic highlights the collapse of the traditional right. “The metric center, the center of the system, which is in the middle between the left and the extreme right, has collapsed, which is worrying, because history shows that when that happens, good things do not come.”
“The center is empty in Chile, there is no party that represents it,” agrees Sergio Toro, director of the School of Government at the Universidad Mayor. “The extreme right is gradually absorbing what we thought was the most extreme right, which was the UDI” (a party linked to Jaime Guzmán, the ideologue of the previous Constitution) and keeping its electoral capacity. The Republican Party “is no longer only positioned on the extreme right, but is occupying the entire spectrum of the right in general,” adds Toro.
This leaves the question of whether those who voted for the Republicans do so because “from one moment to the next people veered in their moral foundations towards the extreme right” or if it is a rejection vote in opposition to what the Government is doing, analyzes Toro, for which the response is mixed and it remains to be seen if they become continuous right-wing or extreme right-wing voters.
Mandatory voting, the key to results
Several analysts also recall the importance of compulsory voting in the last two elections, the one for the exit plebiscite and the one this May. If in the elections prior to these a little more than 7 million people had participated with a voluntary vote in the best of cases, in the last two have participated 13 million and more than 12.4 millionwhich means a number of important voters who have not gone to the polls in all these years and whose behavior is difficult to predict.
“With the compulsory vote, a group of people also enters who do not define their ideological position but do define their approach to certain proposals. Any group that is in the Government is threatened by a group of voters that is rejecting the ways in which they are carried out regardless of the ideological position”, analyzes Toro.
The objective of the punishment vote would be to seek alternatives regarding government errors that, for Toro, would be “becoming part of programmatic agendas and moral foundations of the right, such as security and order.”
Obviously, that the groups that have not traditionally raised this and for which it is not part of their program “are not comfortable with it and it is generating political ambivalence.” For the academic, the triumph of the Republican Party is due in large part to the fact that it was consistent in its positions and that “in times of uncertainty, people seek certainties more than ever.”
“The government has fallen a lot on that, not following the line with which it was elected, moving from one side to another, being ambivalent,” he adds. “People seek certainty, but the Executive has been erratic and the entire political group that accompanies it It is viewed with resentment,” he says.
Kast’s or Pinochet’s Constitution?
As for the future, what are the chances that the new Constitution will be more progressive or very different from the one that already exists from the dictatorship?
“We would be lucky if the new Charter does not differ much from the current one, it could be a much more authoritarian Constitution that implies significant setbacks in terms of rights”, points out Suárez-Cao and Toro agrees for whom “social, parity or ecological demands, they will have more difficulty entering” the Magna Carta proposal.
However, as there is a plebiscite to leave the text on December 17, the two right-wing blocs will have to seek a broader conversation so that the text is approved “and the history of September 4 is not repeated.” If this is not the case, “there will be criticism for the partisan nature of the Constitution, as occurred in the first process,” says Marcelo Mella, a political scientist at the University of Santiago, USACH.
As for the second major effect of the elections, the four analysts consulted by France 24 agree that this is going to have a great impact on the government and its ability to negotiate the reforms they want to promote.
Rodrigo Espinoza believes it possible that “the role of the opposition on the right will harden even more trying to stop the government’s reforms, especially the short law on isapres (private health), the pension reform, the tax reform that the possibility was being analyzed to enter it in the Senate or the discussion for the minimum wage”.
The loss of the electoral support of the ruling party will “increase the price of the costs of the negotiation with sectors of the opposition” and it is probable that the tax, health and pension reform “will continue to move more to the right in their contents”, since the cost of negotiating and achieving majorities for the Executive branch rises to the extent that it has lost support from public opinion, says Mella.
The next two or three years of the Boric Administration will surely have to be governed on the basis of these results, which in the medium term could be very important for the achievements of the leftist president who arrived at La Moneda with great expectations of the population.
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