Gabriel Boric’s impressive victory in the Chilean elections, with an overwhelming 55% of the vote, is much more than a mere local result, and has direct consequences on Latin America but also about the Spanish politics. The messages that Chile sends to the world are multiple and transformative, and that is why they have already begun to be minimized by those who have been pointed out here.
1) Well-channeled mobilizations are transformative and reforms are possible. Gabriel Boric was in 2011 the leader of the Federation of Students of the University of Chile in a student revolt inspired in part by the Spanish 15M, but that knew how to mature and evolve in a political movement, which accompanied the 2019 protests and the outrage against the police violence that outraged Chile and went around the world for its brutality. Boric’s victory comes from that social and political earthquake, which comes with the unavoidable commitment to a profound reform of the Constitution. Boric’s merit is having managed to transform the energy and rage of 2011 and 2019 into a movement with enough force to fundamentally modify the Chilean Constitution. The comparison with Spain is bloody: while in Chile the left has triumphed, here Pablo Iglesias has had to abandon politics persecuted by the extreme political and media right. And while in Spain the Constitution is a kind of ridiculously untouchable sacred text, in Chile it will be reformed in depth.
2) You can break with the past. Boric has not won the elections to any conservative but to José A. Kast, a dangerous far-right populist, which above had eluded explicitly denouncing the bloody Pinochet dictatorship. In these elections, Chile was also at stake to endorse its criminal past or to condemn it: the fact that Katz has been defeated allows him toa definitive break with Pinochet’s sinister past, which in Chile is a whitewashed figure by a sector of society, as happens with Franco in Spain. It is no accident that a few months ago Kast met with Abascal, the leader of Vox, in Santiago, nor that Pablo CasadoIn his recent visit to Chile, he said, referring to Boric, that “the possible Chilean drift towards positions that we already know in Spain, such as Podemos” is very worrying. In other words, Abascal and Casado have also been defeated in Chile, not only because of their clumsy previous movements but also because of their theses on historical memory.
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3) The defeat of neoliberalism. There is much more to Boric’s victory than a simple left turn. In his program, and in his campaign speeches, there is a systematic attack on neoliberal reforms that have marked the Chilean agenda in the last decade of conservative governments. Boric, who has swept more than 70% of the vote in some poor neighborhoods, has promised that will re-state many privatized basic services, for example that of water, even recognized as a private good in the 1980 Constitution. Chile, despite having the second highest GDP of the most populous countries in Latin America behind Uruguay, has said a ‘enough’ sound to inequality and privatization. In Spain, the PP of Casado and especially of Ayuso, bases its discourse on the inefficiency of public services and that the only thing that works is the private sector. This thesis has also been defeated in Chile.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com