By: Juan de Dios Valdivieso, Regional Director of IdeaPaís in O’Higgins.
The disconnection that our politics suffers is undeniable. The Bicentenario survey shows that trust in political parties and parliamentarians – in a sad tie – fell to a very poor 1%, that is, it lost even the limited gains in trust achieved after 2019. There are more than 100 examples of this disconnection. the ones one would like. Let us think, for example, of the obstacles to the rules for the use of force proposed by the government: this requirement for the police to act with differentiated criteria in public order operations, depending on whether those involved are sexual minorities, indigenous peoples or minors. An absurdity that does not stand up to analysis.
Let us also think about the rejection, by Congress, of the feral dog law. The results of the vote, in effect, left the ecosystems, the native fauna and the ranchers throughout Chile in distress, especially in regions as rural as ours. Thus, parliamentarians criminalize what is nothing more than a desperate action to control an introduced predator (generally, due to the abandonment of some irresponsible person).
A third example of this problem is in the countless times that political attempts are made to impose invented words or concepts that are totally foreign to our daily lives. In this way, public policies are covered in a language loaded with ideologies that, for ordinary mortals, are counterintuitive, unnecessary, or downright absurd. Thus, for example, simple mixed baths in a fishing cove were recently celebrated as a “new paradigm”: “coves with a gender perspective.”
The list is almost endless. But the patience of Chileans is not. It is not in vain that surveys inform us that, for a large part of the citizenry, the figure of the authoritarian becomes more attractive day by day, the charismatic leader without counterweights who does not need disconnected institutions to courageously undertake the decisions that no one dares. to take
But there is an alternative path and it is urgent to take it as soon as possible: strengthen our institutions. How is it done? There is no magic antidote, by the way. But there are some elementary steps: that the government definitively supports the Carabineros and the Investigative Police, that President Boric addresses the security crisis with a vision of the State once and for all, that the intelligence law sees the light, that the Justice separates the corrupt as soon as possible, that Congress begins the reform of the political system to oil that rusty machine and give governability to Chile, that the parties rigorously select the candidates for this end of the year, so that we do not have new cases like that of the Municipality of Rancagua.
Chile’s patience, we said, is not infinite. To avoid the arrival of broad-brush populism, of simple solutions to complex problems, our political elite must address these issues as soon as possible. This requires professionalism and courage even greater than the brave mask of the populist. Because doing so is unpopular: it implies, for example, empowering parties and reforming the political system, which to some seems the height of disconnection. But in reality it is the opposite, as much as it may seem to the president, strengthening our political system is, precisely, the only way to regain the trust and helpfulness of the State, and to achieve, once and for all, order and tranquility. for Chile.
