Boric can deliver a better Constitution than Pinochet – 05/13/2023 – Celso Rocha de Barros

Last Sunday, the leftist government of Gabriel Boric was defeated in the elections of the new Chilean constituents. The ruling coalition Unidad para Chile won just 17 of the 51 seats on the council that will discuss the new constitutional text.

The center-right Chile Seguro coalition also fared poorly, winning just 11 seats. The big winner of the night was the radical right Republican Party, which won 23 seats.

In the last week, analyzes of the Chilean defeat proliferated that were 100% predictable when you already knew the political position of the analyst. The radical left accused Boric of moving too close to the center. The right accused the Chilean president of having lost himself in his leftism.

I myself, a social democrat and sympathizer of the old Chilean Socialist Party, am tempted to say that the new Chilean left should confine itself to reforming the country’s welfare state, whose privatist character was one of the main targets of the revolts of the last decade. I may even be right, but I’m also making a diagnosis by ideological reflex.

Last week’s debate almost exactly mirrored the discussion on the reasons for Boric’s defeat in the plebiscite on the 2022 draft Constitution. Besides being very long, it was far to the left of the positions of the average Chilean.

There was something of the Brazilian June 2013 in the Chilean Constituent, with a large number of constituents elected individually, outside the parties, without experience and, often, without seriousness or consistency.

However, it is good to be careful before repeating the analyzes of almost a year ago. According to political scientist Talita São Tiago-Tanscheit, from Diego Portales University, “the last issue of the election was the Constituent Assembly itself”. For the researcher, discussions about public safety and migration prevailed. This helps to understand the victory of the radical right.

It is also possible that the anti-establishment sentiment that elected Boric has migrated from left to right. São Tiago-Tanscheit believes that “any Chilean president, in the current situation, would be poorly evaluated, because the general malaise with politics is gigantic”.

Political scientist Noam Titelman, author of “La Nueva Izquierda Chilena: de las Marchas Estudantiles a La Moneda” (Editora Ariel, 2023), suspects that this passing of the “anti-system” baton may not have been the last: the Republican Party could also fall victim to the “winner’s curse”, becoming the new target of popular dissatisfaction. If the right insists on the strongly privatized models of social security that currently exist, this possibility will be greater.

On the other hand, cycles of revolt do not usually last forever, and the passage of a new constitution may seem like a reasonable arrival point for an already tired population. It remains for Boric to ally himself with the center-right to ensure that the momentary predominance of the reactionaries is not reflected in the rules of the Chilean game for the coming decades.

It is likely that the Constitution of the Chilean left’s dreams was never possible, but a better Constitution than Pinochet’s still is, and it would be a great victory.

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