On December 19, in a historic day, Chile elected its president in a totally unexpected second round. With a record for the highest electoral participation equivalent to 55.68% (8,400,000 on a voter base of 15,030,974), Gabriel Boric defeated José Antonio Kast, becoming the youngest president in the history of Chile, which also came in a second position after the first round with 1,814,809 votes against Kast’s 1,961,122.
In the 2017 elections, Sebastián Piñera won the second round with 3,796,579 votes, this time Boric garnered more than 4,600,000 votes. This broke the record of Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, who obtained 4,040,497 votes in the 1993 elections, when by the way, voting was mandatory.
But what happened so that in less than a month, more than 2,700,000 people decided their vote for Gabriel Boric, this means the triumph of the left?
In an interview for El Economista, Nicolás Camerati, doctor in sociology from the Paris Descartes University, the Sorbonne, France, and a specialist in research, ways of life and public policy, assures that it was not Boric and his 35 years, nor his leftism, either having been part of social movements or a consequence of a political strategy, which led him to triumph, “was the historic moment and shared emotion.”
In this sense, the Chilean specialist maintains that representative democracy is saturated and dying. He explains that although Boric made a “good strategy”, a little more towards the center and that generated comfort, their discussions are still inside palaces, “in reality the mobilization that went to vote is not partisan, it does not even agree with the representative democratic system, but due to the historical situation it had to do so against the extreme right ”.
Ensures that in Chile There was a capacity for perception that was necessarily going to generate mobilizations at the right time, “today those who do not believe in a political party made a difference. It was necessary, with an almost cinematographic situation, where as magical realism, two million people appeared, when it is known that 50% of the Chilean population does not actually vote ”.
A path of social revolt
Dr. Camerati explains that the election results have a powerful background. We could start from October 18, 2019 when the so-called “social outbreak” occurred, at which time Chileans took to the streets raising their voices for various demands, then during the pandemic, many voices appeared that historically had not had a presence in the streets, “it was a social saturation in the face of an arrogance of the State and of a president who did everything to make this happen.”
This social revolt generated a total change in terms of the national environment and that changed the entire perceptual conception of the people, “a new historical moment is lived, which was visual, which was seen in the streets, on the walls, and then came the pandemic”.
The first way out of the revolt, said the specialist, was the vote to generate the project of the Constituent process, here it was voted for something very particular, it was a vote for a change in politics from its base, the foundation, which is the National Constitution , which had its origin in the Pinochet dictatorship. “This was one of the largest votes that Chile had”, around 51% of the population voted (7,500,000), of them, 80% said yes to the constitutional change and its structure.
In contrast, the elections came to configure the local legislative and executive power (governors), here the participation was lower and the right wing won. The primary elections for the presidency followed, “on this occasion the people who voted for the constitutional change and who mobilized, did not go to vote.”
With these results, Dr. Camerati explains that what can be understood is that the electoral representative system remains the same, those who participate remain the same and talking about the same, and believe that with more or less real strategies, they raise to the people, “but the voters are 47% of the population, they do not change the figures of power and they maintain discussions with zero coupling with what is really happening abroad and with the diversity of people, those who do not it has a partisan culture … () The problem is that politicians continue to believe that they did things well ”.
In conclusion, although it could be said or thought that Boric was very good in his strategy to reach people and mobilize more than two million people in a short time, the reality is different. mobilization, but rather the collective emotion of the moment, the question was: do we go back to the same thing or do we change?
The future
For Dr. Camerati, the Boric government has little time to take hold. Today’s president’s first fight will be the Constituent, which has to come out in 2022, with that result the presidency, political credibility and the Chilean situation are at stake.
Furthermore, “in another year we are going to find a government with internal problems because now the Parliament has it on the right and it will not be able to change the system, it will find internal negotiation problems on the issues that are fundamental to the diverse civil societies that are mobilizing … () People are participating, they want to speak, but in another way, that means innovating in participation methods and in politics, innovation is almost a taboo concept ”.
He said that you have to understand that there is indeed a crisis over the representative democratic system, in the midst of a much stronger collective conscience, that emotion is going to be much more fluctuating than the systems, so surely we are going to have more crises, either with right or left. “When people are asked what they want, it is not to vote, people want historical changes, new structures and that is not being part of Chilean or Latin American politics.”
How are the presidential elections played in Chile?
The 1980 Constitution orders in its article 26 that the president must be elected by direct vote by an absolute majority of votes.
In the event that there are more than two candidates in the first round and none of them achieves that majority, the second round will be between the first two.
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Reference-www.eleconomista.com.mx