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On 16 November, Chile will hold elections for president as well as both houses of parliament. There are fears that this will mean the far right taking power. This is because, despite the fact that the left-wing coalition’s presidential candidate, Jeannette Jara of the Communist Party of Chile, is leading in all the polls, it seems all but impossible that the former minister of labour and social security from the outgoing left-wing progressive government will be able to win over an absolute majority of the voters.
Torge Löding directs the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Cono Sur Regional Office in Buenos Aires.
Should no-one achieve an absolute majority in the first round of voting, there will be a presidential run-off, likely to be against whichever far-right candidate manages to get their nose out in front. A possible contender is José Antonio Kast, founder of the Republican Party of Chile, a man with German heritage and a great fondness for the military dictator Augusto Pinochet. “For a long time, the right has been threatening a return to power. Four years ago, the progressive Gabriel Boric was only just able to see off Kast. His record in office has however been so disappointing that the far right will be able to count on a lot of protest votes”, says Celso Calfullan, a Mapuche activist who runs the left-wing online portal Werken Rojo (Red Herald).
Despite the relatively tight election results and the absence of a left-wing parliamentary majority, the presidential term for the left-wing party Frente Amplio (Broad Front) got off to a flying start at the beginning of 2022. Boric had won the election following the rise of a protest movement opposed to the neoliberal economic and social system first ushered in during the military dictatorship by the “Chicago Boys” associated with Milton Friedman.
In November 2019, the main political parties signed an Agreement for Social Peace and a New Constitution. To replace the old dictatorship-era constitution, the agreement proposed the founding of a Constitutional Convention to devise a new one. Voting for members of the Convention saw a clear victory for left-wingers and progressives, while the right failed to even reach the 33 percent threshold needed to form a blocking minority.
The Failure of the Constitutional Referendum
“The Boric government promised much in terms of reform; due to the lack of a parliamentary majority they went with the strategy that they would wait to implement the most important plans until the September 2022 referendum on adopting the new constitution. The reforms went hand in hand with elements from the new draft constitution, and their calculation was that, following the massive public vote in favour of the new constitution, the reforms would then also be passed in parliament”, explains Pierina Ferretti, president of Nodo XXI, Frente Amplio’s think tank.
But this gamble did not pay off, because the constitutional draft failed to receive a majority of votes in the referendum. Since then, the Boric government has been on the defensive, and it has struggled to chalk up many successes.
The rejection of the left-wing draft constitution did lasting damage to the government. Their tax reforms also failed in parliament, meaning they also lacked the funds to finance their social reforms.
The main beneficiary of the government’s defeat was Kast, who had spearheaded the “No” campaign under the slogan “Rechazo” (Reject). He is closely allied with Spain’s Vox party and Germany’s AfD; the German-Chilean Sven von Storch, husband of AfD politician Beatrix von Storch, was Kast’s foreign policy advisor for the 2021 election. While the Constitutional Convention was locked in a nine-month debate over the 388 articles of the draft constitution, the right was concentrating on an effective disinformation campaign. With millions in donations from businesses and Chile’s wealthiest families, they were able to spread false rumours in the media, for example by claiming that home ownership would be banned. They also smeared plans to expand the rights of Indigenous people and women.
For the first time, voting in the referendum was mandatory, resulting in an 86 percent turnout of eligible voters rather than the usual 50 percent. “The new voters overwhelmingly came from the poorest sectors of society. Because the new constitution was intended to improve their living conditions, we thought that they would automatically be on our side. That was a mistake,” admits Ferreti.
In a vote to elect members of a new Constitutional Council in May 2023, the right won in a landslide, securing 33 of the 50 seats. They went on to present a draft constitution that managed to go beyond the cruelties of the Pinochet-era constitution, in force since 1980. But this new draft also failed to receive majority support in the following referendum, meaning that the Pinochet constitution remains in force. “The five million new voters, who had previously been excluded from the political system, have clearly rejected the ideas of both the left and the right in these referendums”, explains Fernando Carmona, president of the Instituto de Ciencias Alejandro Lipschütz (ICAL), the think tank associated with the Communist Party of Chile. “Following the loss in the referendum, the conflicts within Boric’s ruling coalition began to come to a head.”
Only Marginal Improvements
The rejection of the left-wing draft constitution did lasting damage to the government. Their tax reforms also failed in parliament, meaning they also lacked the funds to finance their social reforms.
Nevertheless, Boric’s government also registered some successes. Chile joined the Escazú Agreement for public participation and justice in environmental matters, and bringing lithium mining under state control was at least under discussion. Fernando Carmona sees the biggest success in the initiatives of the ministries led by the Communist Party, such as the “National Search Plan”, a tool for the implementation of human rights for relatives of those who were disappeared or otherwise victims of the dictatorship, as well as flagship projects from the Ministry of Labour and Social Security under Jeannette Jara: the raising of the monthly minimum wage from the equivalent of barely 300 euros to over 500 euros, a minor pension reform, and an incremental reduction in working hours, from 45 to 40 hours a week.
“We are under a lot of pressure when it comes to issues like immigration and security. One million of Chile’s 18 million inhabitants are now immigrants, which puts stress on the social and political system, especially in the border towns. Real political solutions are thus far lacking; the right wants to randomly and illegally deport people, the left is more committed to freedom of movement. But we have to make decisions based on the data if we are to keep the welfare system afloat”, says Carmona. Pierina Ferretti also notes that security remains a serious issue: “In government we were not prepared for the wave of brutal violence from organized crime that was overrunning the country. The police were overwhelmed, and in politics there was a lack of debate and a lack of answers”.
The Fundación Sol (Sun Foundation), an independent, union-aligned economics institute, conducted research into the government’s social reforms. The verdict was sobering. “Naturally it is a good thing to have more time to yourself. In the coming years, weekly working hours will gradually decrease at a rate of one hour each year, going from 45 to 40 hours, and in such a way that the companies cannot get around this by reducing breaks. But unfortunately the workers are paying for this with extreme flexibilization”, concludes Maria José Azocar, an economist with the foundation.
The Right dreams of a better past, one that is impossible to achieve. Whereas we fight for a better future.
In Chile’s private pension system, a new publicly-funded bonus was introduced, whose modest improvements were especially geared towards the situation for women. But hidden in the small print: this would have a limited duration of 30 years, after which the pension system would revert to being entirely private. “These measures do not help to reduce inequality in Chile. GDP has increased over the last decade by around 10 percent, while wages have only gone up by around 6.6 percent. In Chile, half of all wealth is concentrated in the hands of only one percent of the population.”
In Azocar’s view, three important reforms have yet to be adequately resolved: the regulation of subcontractors, which employ eight out of every ten workers in Chile; tax reform; and legislation on the negotiation of sector-wide collective agreements. Because, in Chile, trade unions and their rights are more atomized than in almost any other country: there are more than 9,000 unions, of which half have less than 50 members. Collective bargaining takes place on a micro level within company divisions. “With this law, the trade union movement in Chile would have been immediately and massively strengthened, winning the government a valuable coalition partner, in order to, for example, advance tax reform more effectively. Unfortunately, this was not implemented well”, says Azocar.
Although Boric had campaigned under the slogan “Wallmapu Libre” (Freedom for the Land of the Mapuche), his government failed to seriously negotiate with Indigenous peoples. Organized shortly after coming into government, the interior minister’s mediation mission in the Mapuche territory was a failure. The Mapuche activist Calfullan was critical of the government: “Boric and his people only saw it in symbolic terms. But the Mapuche demand more than the right to their language and culture. We demand the return of territories that were taken from us by past governments and businesses”.
Is a Right-Wing Government on the Way?
How can Chile’s shift to the right be stopped? Should Jara lose the presidential election, the hopes of her electoral alliance will rest on parliament. Because the Chilean electoral system favours large coalitions, all moderate and left-wing parties have joined forces to run under a unity ticket. “This way, we can make it more difficult for any right-wing president to govern”, says Feretti, hopefully.
Meanwhile, Kast — the greatest electoral hope for the right — has already stated his desire to circumvent parliament. And according to the polls, the two candidates who are polling behind second-placed Kast are from the far right: Evelyn Matthei from the Independent Democratic Union (UDI) and the proud daughter of a Pinochet general, who has claimed that the fates of the dictatorship’s victims were “necessary”, and Johannes Kaiser, founder of the National Libertarian Party (PNL), who styles himself as the Chilean version of the Argentinian “chainsaw president” Javier Milei.
For the Communist Party’s Fernando Carmona, when it comes to the vote, nothing is set in stone. “The only way to stop the far right is to put forward policy proposals that will improve the living conditions of five million new voters, who count among those who have lost out to neoliberalism and have little chance of improving their circumstances. The Right dreams of a better past, one that is impossible to achieve. Whereas we fight for a better future”.
This text was first published in nd in cooperation with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Translated by Rowan Coupland and Marty Hiatt for Gegensatz Translation Collective.
