[Three student leaders try to meet with the president of Chile, Sebastián Piñera, cerca 2012, and are turned away. No matter, the guy on the right is now the president.]
The first thing many of us noticed about the December 19
second round vote for president in Chile was how eerily closely it tracked the
1988 plebiscite in which the country voted on whether Pinochet should remain in
power for another eight years.
2021 results: President
Gabriel Boric 55.87%
(Apruebo Dignidad-left)
José Antonio Kast 44.13%
(Christian Social Front-right)
1988 results: Pinochet to remain as president
No 55.99%
Yes 44.01%
Pinochet lost under his own rules and had to prepare for competitive
elections a year later. Or, as the historic headline in the opposition
newspaper Fortín Mapocho put it, “He Ran Alone and Came in Second.”
Chile’s electoral system, which assures that the candidate
with the most votes wins—quite a foreign concept for some of us—allows anyone
to run in the first round, then puts the top two vote-getters into a runoff a
month later. (Several Latin American countries vote this way.) Kast, the fundamentalist
Catholic who openly admired the Pinochet years, came out on top in the first vote,
sending a good half of the country into a profound shock. After all the
mobilizations of the last few years, no one could quite fathom how so many
people were ready to back someone who didn’t even pretend to regret the horrors
of the 1973-1990 dictatorship.
One common feature of the two-step voting procedure, known
as ballotage, is that voter participation tends to drop off for the second
round. That didn’t happen in Chile, and my impression from this distance is
that people hit the streets in an all-out effort to convince their peers and
neighbors that this was not the moment for cynical indifference. The estimates
for second-round newcomers were something in the 300-400 thousand range, gives
the high stakes. In actual fact, 1.2 million new voters showed up. Instead of a
cliffhanger, Boric walked away with a crushing victory.
If anyone had funny business in mind to manipulate or
dispute the results, the size of the winning margin wrecked those plans.
(Something similar may have happened in Honduras, where the non-narco candidate
racked up solid margins. Stealing elections is a lot easier when the races are
close.) One dirty trick did seem to be playing out when people in many poorer
(pro-Boric) neighborhoods found that public transport was suddenly
non-existent. We’ll have to wait for more investigation of what happened, but many
are suspicious that it wasn’t an accident. In the end, none of it mattered.
Boric came to public attention during the student mobilizations
of 2011-13, one of a crop of very young activists who guided that movement
adeptly and scored considerable victories. Several of them, Boric included,
then parleyed their leadership into seats in the national legislature and have
accumulated important experience and credibility, despite active hostility from
the right-wing press (essentially all the major outlets). When the “penguin” revolt
of high school students erupted in 2018, they were well placed in their senatorial
tribunes to echo the popular demands.
I’m too far away from the country both physically and
temporally to know much granular detail about Boric’s programs or the
constellation of party and institutional forces that constitute his base. That
said, I am willing to predict that his presidency will not imitate the
disappointing Blair-ite, Third Way, all-hat-no-cattle, more-of-the-same-only-different
governments that usually arise after an interesting new political character
appears. Nor do I anticipate Venezuelan demagoguery with high-blown rhetoric masking
dysfunction and a personality cult.
Despite the parallel with the 1988 plebiscite, the two events
are far from equivalent. The NO vote 30-plus years ago was a NO to further
dictatorship, NO to the secret police, impunity, disappearances, systematic
torture, corruption, and rule by the rich. Beyond that, people were not of one
mind and still remained fairly traumatized by the chaotic end of Allende’s
Popular Unity government (1970-73), which had concluded in the bombing of La
Moneda and summary executions. The alternative at that time to more of Pinochet
and his regime was a return to the centrist parties, including those that had
supported the military takeover out of hostility to Allende. In fact, a major encourager
of the coup became the country’s first president after the democratic
restoration.
This time around, the choice was far more stark: back to the
Pinochet days or a clean break with all the parts of the Pinochet package, not
just political repression but more to the point, the economic variety. Boric
has promised that Chile, the birthplace of the neoliberal model, will also be
its tomb. Those are strong words, and an ample majority of the Chilean
population is ready for them to be fulfilled. Education, health, pensions,
housing—all the basic components of a decent life, are ripe for a thorough
overhaul because after three decades of glowing discourse about the Chilean “success”
story, plenty of citizens have seen the well-to-do elite continue to hoover up
most of the benefits of economic growth while their own lives fail to improve.
This should be easy for Americans not lost in the pointless
babble of our pundit class to grasp. Boric’s victory was a clear repudiation
not only of nostalgia for the dictatorship but also of the failure of the two
previously dominant political blocs to create conditions so that the majority
of Chile’s citizens can have a decent life. These blocs, roughly equivalent to
the Democrats and the Republicans here, are now deeply discredited by their
failure, and the country has opted for something new. Chile’s political system,
unlike our own, made it possible.
Boric comes to power just as the Constituent Assembly is due
to wrap up its formulation of a new constitution for the country to replace the
1981 version written under Pinochet’s guidance and designed to sustain an
ongoing dictatorship of the private sector, which it has done quite
successfully. The new version has the potential of loosening the minority
right-wing’s successful block of any threats to its outsized influence.
Chile has long been a social laboratory, and Boric’s
determination to bury neoliberalism should be taken seriously. Margaret
Thatcher famously noticed Pinochet’s adoption of the Chicago Boys/Friedmanite
school of capitalist restoration to reverse the postwar consensus, and Ronald
Reagan took a leaf from her book. We have lived with the result for 40 years.
Things often bubble up from the global South, and we tend to
be too First World-centric to pay sufficient notice. Chile has deeply
entrenched social and economic inequalities, but the incoming team also has the
resources to experiment with a fairer system and to face down the inevitable
trench warfare that the privileged classes will now stage.
Chile also has the painful memory of the last go-round with
a left-wing experiment, and even though the Boric generation is too young to
remember it directly, the country as a whole, and especially its leftist
currents, has ample collective knowledge of how important it is for them to
play their cards just right. In a world sorely lacking in role models, we may
be permitted to hope for, to root for, great things.
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