Despite the importance of the election of 346 mayors and several thousand councilors, what Chilean political parties have most in mind are the parliamentary and presidential elections next year. The municipal elections next November will constitute, above all, a true primary between the official and opposition leaders.
Despite all their disagreements, the political leaders are currently agreeing on all types of electoral pacts with the purpose of prevailing over their adversaries. From the Government, to reverse the growing unpopularity of Gabriel Boric; from the opposition, to present a presidential candidate that will allow them to return to La Moneda in the near future.
All the electoral compromises of the present cannot ignore the fact that in both sectors there are deep internal disagreements. Especially within the center-left, where the tension between the communists and the Broad Front against their allies of socialism, the PPD, Christian democracy and other centrist forces will hardly be able to save and project their alliance towards a new presidential period.
All of this today has, as a consequence, the inability of the Executive to comply with the most radical changes promised during Boric’s presidential candidacy. The balanced distribution of the numerous and well-paid government positions seems to be what best explains why the ruling party remains assembled. Because among their main concerns, political communities must ensure the “job stability” of their militants. This is when personal interests and those of the ruling castes take precedence over ideological aspirations and programmatic promises. Especially if they abjure social mobilization to support the reforms.
In this sense, it is difficult to explain the electoral agreements between the most radicalized sectors of the left that encouraged, for example, the Social Outbreak of 2019, scathingly criticizing those who were part of the Concertación and New Majority governments. Those who were, finally, so discredited before the citizens as to twice explain the electoral victory of the right with Sebastián Piñera.
But so-called “electoral engineering” can explain everything. Also in the right-wing sectors where two, at times irreconcilable, tendencies are clearly expressed, such as that represented by the far-right José Antonio Kast and the already proclaimed standard bearer of the UDI, Evelyn Matthey. However, both sectors know that separately it would be very difficult to access the Executive again and consolidate a majority in the National Congress. In this way, in the upcoming municipal elections these groups are going to compete on their own, although they are already consolidating hidden pacts by omission between some with the double purpose of winning mayoralties and adding more votes than the ruling party with a view to the presidential elections. .
There are many right-wing groups that make it difficult for them to integrate a single electoral reference. However, we know that their disagreements fall apart when the sectors they represent and finance tighten their grip. That is, the business associations, a good part of the foreign investors and factual groups like El Mercurio. To which today we must add the pressure of global conservatism, interested in a country like ours never again leaning to the left and putting the neoliberal model in check. Which for now remains so valid thanks to the convergence of right-wingers and center-leftists. Whether from La Moneda or Parliament.
As so often happens in politics, what there are now in Chile are thousands of candidates and dozens of leaders in competition, too, with a large number of independent candidates who have left their parties in frustration at not being added to the elections. different presidential electoral lists.
It is also clear that the competition is already marked by propaganda that reveals empty names of proposals in relation to the demands of the country’s communes, where real life takes place and security problems and severe economic-social asymmetries are constantly suffered. . Those who wait for fair pensions, those who make up hospital waiting lists, those who set up camps in the dream of their own home, the thousands of university debtors of the State-backed Credit and that growing mass of immigrants dramatically infiltrated by organized crime and drug trafficking mafias.
All under a rule of law supervised by the military and police who hold the different public powers hostage, in which the tone now is the existence of a center-left government determined to “pacify” Araucanía, imprison the Mapuche leaders who previously were praised, protect the sacrosanct market economy and grant confidence to national and foreign investors.
Faced with an opposition that is also greedy, eager to win elections instead of conforming to everything the Government and the leftist parties do (as they are called) to serve their ideas and interests that are already ancestral in our politics.
