I’ll tell you what happened in the first round of the presidential elections in Chile
Chile, the right is in the lead in the presidential and legislative elections. The right-left ballot on 19 December will be decisive. The study by Livio Zanotti, author of ildiavolononmuoremai.it
Far-right candidate José Antonio Kast, 55, the son of a German immigrant, former Wermacht officer and brother of a Pinochet minister, wins the first round and his party wins half the Senate. That of the left, Gabriel Boric, 35, a student leader imposed on the parties by the big protests in the square of 2019 that led to the abjuration of the Constitution inherited from the military dictatorship, enters the ballot of next December 19 detached by two points, less than 150 thousand votes, out of the more than 7 million cast (47% of those entitled). A ghost candidate, with judicial problems and a refugee in the United States, Franco Parisi, obtained 13% by participating in the electoral campaign exclusively by electronic means. The 5 moderate candidates are all excluded.
A single explanation is not enough to shed full light on the largely disconcerting results of last Sunday's first round of elections in Chile. Their logic, however, appears to be summarized in the profound social fracture, which is economic and cultural, determined by the undeniable modernization of the country in the 30 years of democratic life following the Pinochet dictatorship. In model Chile, proud of its stability based more on exports than on the growth of the internal market, 11 per cent of the 20 million inhabitants suffer from hunger and job insecurity has increased to a similar extent. This is the recent denunciation of Latinobarometro, the major institute of actuarial statistics in the subcontinent. And the parties that controlled the institutions until 2019 lost millions of members, detaching themselves from the living reality of the country, which they nevertheless continued to represent.
The outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic has shifted attention away from this latent crisis, but in all likelihood dramatizing it further. In the disruption of the system that politics in Latin America (and in the West as a whole, of which it is not only geographically extreme offshoot), Chile now presents itself as an involuntary model of general problematicity. From Mexico to Argentina, going down the Isthmus countries to Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil and finally to this southern tip, there is a crowd of candidates who are not entirely new to politics, among which those of the extreme right stand out, who they recover a certain protagonism showing singular profiles, sometimes eccentric traits, out of the lines. Invariably united, however, in an ultra-liberal faith which, in order to be declared absolute, presents patent and profound contradictions with even more conservative liberal thought.
In Buenos Aires, in the mid-term renewal of Parliament last week, it was the turn of Javier Milei, 51, an unconditional admirer of Milton Friedman and his monetarist theories who, starting from the last twentieth century, have updated those of the economic school of Vienna (Von Mises, Von Hayek…). Elected deputy, for the first time in the last 40 years he brings a radical attack into the congressional debate on none other than the prince, junker and chancellor Von Bismarck, as the inventor of the welfare state that he hopes to raze to the ground in Argentina with a campaign of massive privatizations. It is the same idea of the lawyer Kast, who intends to do the same in Chile, at the same time as the militarization of the borders to block immigration and a radical liberalization of the labor market. Some commentators write today that he wants to put too much meat on the fire.
Albeit with more peremptory than conciliatory tones, the prospect of the second round actually leads him in these hours to address a request for help to the defeated center-right candidates. Pointing to them that in recent Chilean electoral history the candidates who prevailed in the first round invariably won the subsequent ballot. In this case, however, there is an unprecedented circumstance. The strong man of the center-right, the one who should therefore endorse the "all with Kast", the outgoing President Sebastìan Piñera, a billionaire entrepreneur, leaves the Moneda building without any authority, worn out by the inability to manage the crisis, indeed in full disrepute. Only narrowly escaped impeachment for conflict of interest and proven violation of tax laws approved by the House and then narrowly blocked in the Senate. And as far as is known, without the least sympathy for Kast, controversial even in a large part of the Chilean establishment.
While Kast's extremism seems to push towards his opponent, Gabriel Boric, the substantial support of the moderate left and the democratic center, both of the socialists and of the Christian Democrats of the Concertaciòn and of the liberal laity. In addition to allaying the residual impatience of those communists who in July had seen with disappointment their candidate in the left primary, the prestigious Daniel Jadue, defeated by the independent deputy of the youth protest, able to obtain double the preferences. The outcome of the ballot therefore remains an unknown factor. Made even less decipherable by the fragmented cultural and political promiscuity that emerged from the electoral belly of Chilean society. Whose resounding surprise was that almost a million votes in favor of an absent candidate, the owner of the "People's Party" (as if to say the Man Anyone or rather the Common People, since he did everything without moving from the United States) , Franco Parisi, physically 14 thousand kilometers away.
This anomaly (that 13 per cent of votes is also concentrated in the small towns of the northern desert, on the porous border with Peru, a detail on which various commentators maliciously insist), added to the massive desertion from the polls (less than half of those who voted law), confronts us with a cultural dimension of last Sunday's elections. It is the indicator of the disturbances caused by the contradictions of its development model in one of the most advanced societies on the entire continent. It reveals that rational thought or, to put it more easily, common sense, fragmented into a thousand shards by the most invasive mass media communication ever known, escapes the orientation of legitimate institutions. Finally manipulated and completely subjectively reassembled in vast folds of society. Luther thanked Gutemberg because the press allowed the spread of the Gospel; 5 centuries later, the hallucinatory effect of flood communication is studied as a social danger ( Too much to know , Ann Blair, Yale Un. Press).
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/vi-racconto-cosa-e-successo-il-primo-turno-delle-presidenziali-in-cile/ on Mon, 22 Nov 2021 18:49:47 +0000.