[The far right’s victory in elections for the Constitutional
Council may be the death knell for a progressive constitution in
Chile. It’s also a needed wake-up call for the Chilean left.]
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CHILE HAS ENTERED ITS THERMIDORIAN PERIOD  
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Marcelo Casals, Translation by Nicolas Allen
May 10, 2023
Jacobin
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_ The far right’s victory in elections for the Constitutional
Council may be the death knell for a progressive constitution in
Chile. It’s also a needed wake-up call for the Chilean left. _

Founder of the far-right Republican Party José Antonio Kast talks to
the press about the victory of his candidates during Constitutional
Council election in Santiago on May 7, 2023. , Javier Torres / AFP via
Getty Images

 

The Chilean far right scored a major victory in Sunday’s elections
for the newly reconstituted constitutional assembly, all but
extinguishing any remaining hope of a new, progressive constitution in
Chile.

The results of the election for the rebranded “Constitutional
Council” would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. Now in
their second attempt to create a constitution, the drafting body still
has a popular mandate to replace the Magna Carta imposed by the
Augusto Pinochet dictatorship in 1980. However, the markedly
right-wing council reflects a massive sea change in Chilean politics
compared to October 2019, when the country erupted in protests against
the neoliberal government of Sebastián Piñera.

The newly formed council will have fifty-one elected seats, of which
twenty-three will be occupied by representatives of the far-right
Republican Party, eleven from the traditional right, and only sixteen
from the Left (plus one representative of indigenous peoples). In
short, Sunday’s results were an electoral disaster of historic
proportions for the Chilean left — the only comparable precedent
being the rejection of the proposed constitution in a 2022 national
plebiscite.

The victory of the far right is even more paradoxical considering
their historical loyalty to the dictatorship and its “legacies.”
Indeed, the Republican Party, associated with recent presidential
hopeful José Antonio Kast, has always vocally opposed any changes to
the existing constitution.

That being the case, the far right is now holding all the cards, and
the approval of the constitution depends on their support. Even more
deflating, the constitutional project is now being drafted by a
technocratic “Committee of Experts,” itself appointed by a
right-led National Congress.

How did Chile come to this?

Fail Worse

Unfortunately, defeat has become a running trend for the Chilean left.
The failed first attempt to draft a new constitution, led by a
left-dominated Constitutional Convention, was the first dose of
reality. The constitutional plebiscite of September 4, 2022, will live
in memory as one of the harshest electoral defeats the Chilean left
has ever been dealt. On that day, amid historic turnout rates thanks
to a new compulsory voting rule, a crushing majority of Chileans
(61.82 percent) rejected the proposal for a progressive constitution
that the convention had been preparing since July 2021.

Among advocates of the “apruebo” (approval) vote, the initial
reaction was one of shock and confusion. To date, there is still no
compelling explanation for an electoral disaster of such magnitude,
with the proposed constitution winning a meager 38.15 percent. That
number, combined with the sudden electoral growth of the far right in
the recent Council election, should be setting off alarm bells.

Apart from some self-criticism of convention procedures, the Chilean
left has yet to carry out a politically productive self-analysis of
their defeat.

For many leaders and intellectuals of the progressive camp, the reason
for the 2022 defeat lay with a right-wing communications campaign. In
that account, citizens were deceived by a “terror campaign” and
“fake news” propagated in the mainstream media and social
networks. The constitutional project was, they argue, derailed by the
failure of the Chilean citizenry to grasp what would have been a great
feminist, environmentalist, and indigenous constitution — the kind
needed to remedy the evils of a constitution designed during the
military dictatorship of Pinochet (1973–1990) and essentially in
effect from 1990 onward. Left-wing leaders in the weeks to come may
repeat the same lines, but that would be a grave mistake.

Apart from some self-criticism of convention procedures, the Chilean
left has yet to carry out a politically productive self-analysis of
their defeat. Now, with the far right’s surprise victory in the new
council, it is more urgent than ever to reach some clarity about where
things went wrong.

The Uprising

One of the hardest things to digest about the September 2022 and May
2023 defeats is that the current political phase, opened with the
uprising of October 2019, should have been enormously favorable for an
anti-neoliberal agenda. That month in 2019 saw massive, spontaneous
social protests — the largest since the 1980s. Millions of citizens
took to the streets, determined to reject the collective humiliation
to which they were subjected by the conservative government of
billionaire Piñera.

The spark may have been the government’s decision to increase the
subway fare in the capital of Santiago, but within days of the
protests, it became clear that the grievances — many and diverse
though they were — were all based on the structural inequalities
born of thirty years of neoliberalism.

In that sense, the “social uprising” of 2019 was the culmination
of a growing wave of mobilizations that began at least as far back as
the student demonstrations of 2011, joined in the following years by
different social movements: against Chile’s privatized social
security system; the excessive administrative centralization in the
nation’s capital; the environmental depredation of transnational
(and national) companies; the shortcomings of the country’s public
health system; and pervasive gender inequalities combatted by feminist
and youth movements, among others.

It is no coincidence that all these grievances were channeled into the
demand for a new constitution. Amid protests, a conservative congress
and government were ultimately forced to accept the bankruptcy of
their political and economic model and initiate an unprecedented
process of constitutional change, which not even the onset of the
COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 could stop.

For some time, the situation still seemed favorable for the Left. In
October 2020, the plebiscite to ratify the beginning of the
constitutional process was decided by an approval vote of 78.28
percent. Furthermore, the May 2021 vote for the Constitutional
Convention elected a heterogeneous majority of independent assembly
members: indigenous, feminists, and environmentalist activists, as
well as intellectuals and militants of left and center-left parties.
The political right, on the other hand, failed to elect a third of
Convention members — the threshold that would have allowed it to
exercise veto power.

Moreover, as the convention was deliberating in November and December
2021, the leftist and former student leader Gabriel Boric clinched the
presidential election. That sequence seemed to imply the end of the
political hegemony of the two large center-left and right-wing blocs
that had dominated during the three decades of post-dictatorial
government.

Chile’s Thermidor

Why, then, did the “rejection” vote triumph in September 2022? And
how did the far right suddenly become the driving force in Chilean
politics?

First, the COVID pandemic and the ensuing economic crisis radically
altered the political landscape, modifying the priorities of large
parts of the Chilean population — including part of the most
mobilized participants of October 2019. The spirit of the “social
uprising” was deeply connected with a strong antiestablishment
sentiment, a fact reflected in the initial plebiscite of 2020 and the
election of independents during the Constitutional Convention of 2021.

The 2022 presidential election was an early warning of a major shift
in popular sentiment, especially since the far-right candidate Kast
won first place in the first round (albeit in a context of high
electoral fragmentation). Parliamentary elections did not augur well
for the Left, either: not only did Kast’s ultraright and the
traditional right come out stronger, so did the People’s Party
(PDG), a populist, demagogic, and opportunistic group, which, despite
its strong antiestablishment discourse, in practice was on the right
of the political spectrum.

The COVID pandemic exposed the crumbling foundations of Chilean
neoliberalism: few state-guaranteed health measures, low wages and
high indebtedness, and regulations favoring capital over labor. All
this resulted in high unemployment mixed with something Chileans had
not experienced for decades: inflation.

Security, migration, and cost of living have now become priority
issues for most Chilean citizens. The right-wing political opposition
and media have seized on this situation to attack the government.

At the same time, the number of undocumented Venezuelan immigrants
increased rapidly, largely in response to public invitations made by
the government of Piñera. The lack of state infrastructure to receive
migrants and the harsh conditions of social marginalization and
overcrowding — coupled with the extreme economic hardship of many
Chileans — caused crime and violence to rise to levels unfamiliar by
local standards.

Security, migration, and cost of living have now become priority
issues for most Chilean citizens. The right-wing political opposition
and media have seized on this situation to attack the government and,
above all, to re-signify the memory of the “social uprising:” no
longer seen as a legitimate and genuine expression of citizen unrest
but as a criminal outburst.

Still dealing with problems internal to his cabinet, Boric’s
government has struggled to adapt to these new circumstances. Boric
supported laws that invest the police with new powers, despite the
fact that the mood on the Left — especially after the police
brutality during the 2019 protests — was calling out for a deep
reform of the “Carabineros,” the main Chilean police institution.
It remains to be seen how effective Boric’s attempt at political
adaption will be, and at what cost to the loyalty of his own political
base.

Worse still, none of Boric’s policies have paid dividends with the
broader Chilean electorate: the far right is still profiting
politically from the hardships of Chilean citizens. In fact, Kast and
his _Republicanos_ have succeeded in converting social deterioration
into millions of votes, with generous funding from the most
reactionary fractions of Chilean capital.

Conventional Quagmire

The constitutional project ran aground for reasons that go beyond
economic and social circumstances. To date, the Chilean left has said
very little about a separate issue: the ideological problems that
dogged the convention’s proposals. At the center of those proposals
was the idea of a “social state” and “social rights,” which
included provisions to ensure gender equality, the right to a
pollution-free environment, and measures for the recognition,
reparation, and autonomy of indigenous peoples.

All of these are legitimate banners for the Chilean left. To dismiss
them as the caprices of “identity politics” is to be out of step
with the changes the Chilean left has undergone in recent decades.
However, many debates at the convention revolved around simplistic
understandings of Chilean history that did little to endear them to
the general populace: the state and the republic, some claimed, are
oppressive structures created by the ruling classes and have
straitjacketed indigenous ancestral identities (now apparently free to
emerge in all their purity). The nation, they continued, should be
“pluralized” into a series of communities (or “peoples”)
rooted in “territories,” thus questioning the constitutive unity
of the country itself.

This pluralized notion of the state and the nation gave rise to a set
of proposals that left a bad taste in people’s mouths: the call for
separate local justice systems for indigenous peoples or the
replacement of the Senate (one of the oldest in the modern world) by a
chamber of regional representation.

The media cast a spotlight on these controversial aspects and
amplified a number of scandals surrounding the convention with the
clear objective of discrediting it and inflating the “rejection”
vote in the exit plebiscite. But the full magnitude of the defeat lies
elsewhere.

Many members of the convention continued to act as if the country were
living in a constant state of social upheaval. Indeed, the resounding
number of votes obtained in the 2020 plebiscite had convinced many
that approval was all but guaranteed and that the actual contents of
the constitution were almost secondary. And it was that optimism that
discouraged a more comprehensive discussion about how a constitution
could advance a new Chilean state and society in line with popular,
working-class aspirations.

The state, the republic, the nation, and democracy are all familiar
enough sites of struggle for the Chilean left. After all, Salvador
Allende’s “Chilean road to socialism” was built on the idea that
democracy was a conquest of the workers, the nation a community among
equals, and the state an institutional apparatus that could be
conquered, its class biases altered in the pursuit of socialism. The
old left was first and foremost concerned with the material conditions
of existence and the structural inequalities of dependent capitalism.

It is not that these concerns went missing in constitutional debates.
But the simplistic and sometimes unfounded criticisms of republican
egalitarianism, dear to so many social movements, had an outsized role
in discussions of the state. Without the need to renounce feminist,
indigenous, or environmental struggles, the Chilean left must rethink
these causes as part of a comprehensive project of social change that
aspires to take power and build connections with popular and working
sectors.

The simplistic and sometimes unfounded criticisms of republican
egalitarianism, dear to so many social movements, had an outsized role
in discussions of the state.

The usual explanations offered by progressive sectors for their defeat
(the role of the media, the lack of understanding of the people)
betrays a worrying middle-class paternalism toward the Chilean people
who, in their account, would not be virtuous enough to understand what
is in their own interest. Moreover, that thinking prevents the
much-needed political reflection and criticism to get out of the
current political quagmire.

Fifty Years Later

The constitutional process will lumber into 2023 as the product of
left defeat and a sharp conservative turn in Chilean politics and
public opinion. It is a process of limited scope carefully controlled
by establishment parties. Still waiting for the far right–dominated
Constitutional Council to take the reins, a “Commission of
Experts” appointed by Congress is formulating the contents of the
constitution at a safe distance from the popular will.

For now, the Left must act as a force of real resistance to the
conservative onslaught and prevent any radicalization of Chile’s
thirty-year-old neoliberal state. Strange as it may sound, this could
even mean organizing a rejection campaign to stop the passage of a
right-backed constitution. More importantly, in order to recover from
these harsh electoral blows, the Left must begin a process of
introspection about its ideological deficiencies, taking inspiration
in its own rich history.

In 2023, the year marking the fiftieth anniversary of the coup
d’état that violently ended the democratic-socialist government of
Allende and the Popular Unity, the Left would do well to remember
several things: the patience and long-term vision shown by that
political and social formation, built amid advances and setbacks
taking place over several decades. Egalitarian structural change will
not be achieved by a stroke of good fortune or by an enlightened
vanguard of legislators. It will be the product of the slow
accumulation of forces and the construction of a lasting hegemony
rooted in the aspirations, expectations, and interests of the working
majorities of Chile.

_MARCELO CASALS holds a PhD in Latin American history from the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is an associate professor at the
Universidad Finis Terrae in Chile. His latest book
is Counterrevolution, Collaborationism and Protest: The Chilean
Middle Class and the Military Dictatorship (FCE, 2023)._

_NICOLAS ALLEN is a Jacobin contributing editor and the managing
editor at Jacobin América Latina._

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