Tuesday 21 December 2021

Trusting The People: Chile Elects A Far-Left President.

Heartfelt Gratitude: Gabriel Boric’s decisive win, 55 percent to his far-Right opponent’s, Jose Antonio Kast’s, 44 percent, is a reflection of Chile’s two years of political turmoil. Two years of popular mobilisation culminating, first, in the radical Left winning control of the process to create a new Chilean constitution, and now, with the election of the young leader who was dismissed consistently by the mainstream Chilean news media as too radical for the job of President.

I WONDER IF JACINDA will befriend the new President of Chile, Gabriel Boric, with the same enthusiasm that she befriended Justin Trudeau? Boric comes to the presidency at the age of 35 – two years younger than Jacinda Ardern when she became New Zealand’s Prime Minister in 2017 – making him the youngest head-of-state in Chilean history.

The far-Left Boric won his political spurs ten years ago, in 2011, when he emerged as one of the student leaders of the bitter street-fight for more affordable and equitable education services for young Chileans. Boric’s unexpected victory over his far-Right opponent, Jose Antonio Kast, was celebrated by a crowd numbering in the hundreds of thousands in Chile’s capital, Santiago. Older Chileans, remembering the election of the Marxist, Salvador Allende, in 1970, didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. They had seen this movie before.

Boric’s decisive win, 55 percent to Kast’s 44 percent, is a reflection of Chile’s two years of political turmoil. Two years of popular mobilisation culminating, first, in the radical Left winning control of the process to create a new Chilean constitution, and now, with the election of the young leader who was dismissed consistently by the mainstream Chilean news media as too radical for the job of President.

Indeed, Boric was so radical that he drew forth as his principal political opponent an outspoken supporter of Augusto Pinochet, the brutal dictator responsible for the military coup against Allende’s Popular Unity government in 1973. Kast campaigned unapologetically on a hard-Right law-and-order platform and made promises to restore Chile’s traditional (i.e. conservative Catholic) values.

In the first round of voting Kast secured the largest fraction (but less than 50 percent) of the popular vote and, backed by the supporters of the other right-wing parties, was widely predicted to win the final, run-off, contest between himself and scarily radical Boric, the next-highest polling candidate.

Ironically, it was the very real prospect of a Pinochet clone taking control of Chile that mobilised the numbers necessary for Boric to win. Voter turnout surged, with 15 percent more people voting in the second round than the first. Critically, it was the votes of Chile’s youth that turned the tide in Boric’s favour. So radical had been the street-based protests of 2019-20 that there was little enthusiasm among the young for the business-as-usual politics of a presidential election. It was only when they realised that all the gains of the past two years could be wiped-out if they stayed at home that they rallied to the polling-booths in their thousands.

Young Chileans celebrate Boric’s election victory.
It will not all be plain sailing for Boric when he is sworn in as President, in March of 2022. The Chilean Congress remains in the hands of the same centre-Left and centre-Right moderates who have dominated Chilean politics for the past 30 years. Boric can count on a clear majority in neither the Chamber of Deputies nor the Senate, meaning that the fulfilment of his programme to construct a genuinely inclusive “social state” will require either superlative parliamentary skills, or, a willingness to keep the people mobilised – effectively daring the one percenters and their military protectors to do to Boric what they did to Allende.

So, at first blush, it seems most unlikely that Jacinda will be all that keen to be photographed giving Boric a comradely hug at his inauguration. She will be invited, of course, along with heads-of-state and prime ministers from all over the world, and from South America and the Pacific Basin in particular. But will the gal who got hitched at a billionaire’s New Zealand hideaway, and boasted Lorde as her wedding-singer, accept Boric’s invitation? Would Canberra and Washington approve of her being seen to cuddle-up to yet another left-wing Latin-American loose cannon? Once again, it seems most unlikely.

And yet, by March of next year, Jacinda will be facing some pretty daunting choices of her own. Maoridom’s judgement on the recommendations of the He Puapua Report will be out, and the broader debate on co-governance and fundamental constitutional change will be getting underway. If she and her colleagues follow the precedents set over the past four years, and step away from the big political challenges laid at their feet, then Labour’s chances of being re-elected for a third term are slim – at best. Will Jacinda be happy to rest on her Covid laurels? Or will her failure to keep any of Labour’s non-Covid promises overwhelm even those?

Wouldn’t she be wise to spend a little quality-time with President-elect Boric in the intervening months between his stunning victory and his formal inauguration – if only to quiz him about how an historic debate about the future direction of a nation, along with the constitutional reforms required to secure it, might best be organised?

He would likely tell her that once such a process is started, she will find it almost impossible to control – let alone stop. But, he will also likely tell her not to try. By giving ordinary people a real say over their future, her government will bind them to her in exactly the same way that her handling of the Covid crisis in 2020 bound her to “The Team of Five Million”. Trusting the people works, he would tell her. So when, inevitably, those with a vested interest in the status-quo launch their counterattack – don’t flinch. If the people see the future they have won for themselves threatened, they will rally to its – and their leader’s – defence.

That is, after all, his own story.

Besides, 2022 will likely be the year in which Queen Elizabeth II goes to join her fathers. If that happens in the midst of a vibrant constitutional debate in which thousands of young people – young Māori and Pasifika in particular – are engaged, then the chances are high that the inhabitants of these islands will witness the birth of the bi-cultural Republic of Aotearoa. Especially if the combined forces of neoliberal capitalism and the white supremacist Right attempt to strangle it at birth.

Assuming the people prevail, and the Aotearoan republic is born, then the chances must also be high that Chile’s President Boric will cross the Pacific to be present at the inauguration of its first President – his good friend and comrade, Jacinda Ardern.


This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 21 December 2021.

16 comments:

Jens Meder said...

Yes, very interesting:
Will Boric lead Chile towards totalitarian state monopoly capitalism, or a variety of widening wealth ownership based "people's capitalism"?
Or an unsustainable welfare state through consuming more than the profits of productivity can deliver, leading towards widening poverty when all the wealth reserves (including those in the value of money) have been consumed ?
But if he has discovered sustainable prosperity without capitalism (i.e. without having to save for security reserves, trading and profitable or hobby investments) - he will have discovered something "revolutionary" indeed.

Tom Hunter said...

I recall that your side of the fence was ecstatic about Hugo Chavez when he came to power in Venezuela, and Mugabe before him in Zimbabwe.

I guess we'll have to wait and see whether this young man can pull the same tricks with the Congress that those two pulled in their nations. If he can - and I'm sure you and your commentators will be even more giddy with joy if he does - then Chile will go the same way as those two benighted nations.

Trusting the people works, he would tell her.
As you point out, the way He Puapua has been handled suggests that this government does not trust the people, as if police-enforced lockdowns and now traffic-light legislation had not already made that clear.

Tom Hunter said...

You should also take a look at this moving graph of Latin American nations and their income per capita from 1970-2017. Chile and Venezuela highlighted.

Wayne Mapp said...

What is the prospect of a referendum on becoming a republic before the 2023 election. I would have thought zero. What about after the 2023 election?

Surely it would have to be a manifesto commitment. Jacinda would have to have it as a top line item in her election campaign. And then during 2023 to 2026, two referenda. One to decide whether or not to be a republic, another on what type of republic. I doubt whether we would go for a republic that vested political power in a president, much more likely, effectively renaming the governor general. Would there also need to be a new constitution? Not for a titular president, but the Republic of Aotearoa as envisaged here would certainly need a completely new constitution.

New Zealand does not have the history of Chile, no military coups, no revolutions in the accepted sense of that term. Therefore we are unlikely to choose a dramatically radical solution, even if we choose to be a republic. Assuming there is such a choice in the next four years.

Shane McDowall said...

Bi-cultural Republic of Aotearoa ... Yeah right.

New Zealand is slowly but surely becoming Fiji ... with frost.

In the last 50 years, but especially over the last 30, New Zealand has been flooded by people from dodgy Third World countries. People who want to enjoy the stability and prosperity of an English-speaking democracy, without feeling the need to speak proper English or accept our values.

And I would not write-off Elizabeth R. . Her mum almost got to 102, Liz is a sprightly 95.

D'Esterre said...

Next move to the CIA, I'd say, judging by what we saw when Allende was elected.

"...it seems most unlikely that Jacinda will be all that keen to be photographed giving Boric a comradely hug....."

Well of course not. She's a Blairite, not a left-winger.

"...Pasifika in particular..."

Pacific people don't have any more skin in this game than any of the rest of us who are the descendants of the multiplicity of migrants to this country. Their skin colour is irrelevant.

"...birth of the bi-cultural Republic of Aotearoa."

Biculturalism is a pipe dream. We lefties used to talk about it in the 80s and 90s, but it was a mirage then. Even more so now. From the very beginning, there have been migrants here from all over the world, as the ancestry of many of us - including Maori - can attest. It has never been the case that there were only two cultures here.

"...the white supremacist Right..."

Who? Being a right-winger doesn't entail belief in white supremacy. There'd be no more than a handful of such people in NZ, and I'm betting that the SIS knows who they all are. In fact, not long ago, I saw a report to parliament which implied as much. It's highly unlikely that said handful will have any political heft. As to overturning "neoliberal capitalism": that's a "be careful what you wish for" desire, if ever I saw one. Those keenest to dismantle it would scream the loudest at the loss of many of its benefits.

From what I've seen, a sector of society wishes to overthrow neoliberal capitalism in favour of ethno-nationalism: a facet of fascism. No thanks.

Tom Hunter said...

Next move to the CIA, I'd say, judging by what we saw when Allende was elected.

I doubt it. Although the Left never took America's word for it, they really were focused on the USSR spreading their brand of communism through the world. With the USSR dead - and I see we're coming up on the 30th anniversary of its demise - the USA just care all that much about Latin American leftists.

It's why Ortega got back into power in Nicaragua, why Venezuela had Chavez for years and now his thug successors are still power, why relations were re-established with Cuba and Vietnam. The American attitude now seems to be that if the locals are stupid enough to go communist then let them.

greywarbler said...

Perhaps Chile will have a go at following the Northern Spain Mondragon scheme.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/business/cooperatives-basque-spain-economy.html

Introduction, MONDRAGON Corporation
https://www.mondragon-corporation.com › about-us
MONDRAGON is the leading business group in the Basque Country and one of the largest corporations in Spain. It operates throughout the world, ...

Anonymous said...

"...the white supremacist Right..."

Who? Being a right-winger doesn't entail belief in white supremacy. There'd be no more than a handful of such people in NZ, and I'm betting that the SIS knows who they all are.
..........

White supremascist is simply the contra proposition to multiculturalism which holds that a society has no core culture and that everyone's culture is an asset to all the others.
Anthony D Smith says majority ethnic groups are the architecture on which nation states are founded. One thing that suggests to me is that the values of that ethnic group (including it's myths and cultural icons [whatever]) predominate. If not who is in charge? Can 'experts" become the chef's in the cultural kitchen?

Experts say there is no meaningful difference between discussions of white nationalism and white supremacy and so the discussion is banned on Facebook. That's so the likes of Paul Spoonley aren't embarrassed.


Simon Cohen said...

The second coming is at hand. And I just saw a herd of pigs fly past my house.

DS said...



A shame you had to go and ruin a perfectly good article with this nonsense.

(1) Liz isn't going anywhere (if I were her age, in the middle of a rampant Covid epidemic, I would be cutting down on public events too). Phil was much sicker than she's ever been, and he made it to 99.

(2) In marked contrast to New Zealand's last big constitutional debate - that over MMP - the creation of a Republic of Aotearoa would be an entirely top-down (and dare I say it, neoliberal) affair, driven by the well-educated and well-paid. I myself do actually favour a republic in principle - but I'm genuinely torn on the subject in practice, trying to decide what I dislike more, the elitist monarchy, or the elitists who are pushing for a replacement.

(3) It might be worth remembering what places voted to keep the existing flag during Key's flag referendum - South Auckland and the Maori seats being chief among them. It's almost as though the working class, both white and non-white, have bigger concerns than middle-class constitutional ego-projects.

DS said...

New Zealand does not have the history of Chile, no military coups, no revolutions in the accepted sense of that term. Therefore we are unlikely to choose a dramatically radical solution, even if we choose to be a republic. Assuming there is such a choice in the next four years.

Chile didn't have the history of Chile either, until Pinochet. It was one of the most stable democracies in Latin America for many, many decades.

Jens Meder said...

Does anyone know, what does the unsatisfied ("revolutionary" or modest?) Left in NZ really stand for and wish to achieve ?
Do they hope to learn something they are not sure about from Boric ?

Trev1 said...

Thank God the Constitution of Australia preserves the possibility of New Zealand joining the Federal Commonwealth. Looks like we may need it. Thank you MMP.

greywarbler said...

What would a republic do for us? It would be just the Queen is dead, Hail the contender with the oiliest grin.

sumsuch said...

I don't think much of the noddiness of most of your commenters. They come straight from know-nothing-ville. The capitalist Right has no case 'now'. Yet their silliness infuses endlessly -- you can do anything when you have money. Why we die soon, despite many heroes for the rule of the people, not least ...

It required strong socialist countries, those born of '45 all over the developed world, to turn the death of the species away. So sadly, not impossible just a chance missed. Immediate pleasure killed us dead, but that is animals. Glad to hear our unique species' thoughts which outlined how we could avoid our extinction.