Chile "The Working Classes Have Dropped Out"
By Redacción Chile
by Franck Gaudichaud
As head of state since March 2022, elected with the hope of reorienting his country on the path of progressivism, Chile’s young president Gabriel Boric (38) seems rather to have refocused his politics, unable to compete with the conservative bloc or to unite the left around his government. At mid-term, Boric has not yet been able to carry out the expected far-reaching reforms. Luis Reygada interviewed Franck Gaudichaud, a specialist in Latin America, for the French newspaper L’Humanité.
Gabriel Boric came to power embodying the hope of a post-neoliberal turn, in a very particular context since it followed the social explosion of 2019. He was driven by very strong demands, particularly social ones, and was at the head of a coalition including parties much further to the left than he was (such as the Chilean Communist Party) and fundamentally critical of the twenty years of government in the post-dictatorship period, the Concertation (between 1990 and 2010), marked by compromises, even neoliberal management of power by left-wing governments during this period.
Boric thus arrived with promises of profound reforms in a country where the private sector represented the structuring base of society, with a stranglehold on broad and largely deregulated sectors (education, health, pensions and so on). In general, then, there was the hope of a “new Chile” in which the public would succeed in regaining the upper hand over market forces that Boric had hinted at. On all these aspects, the results are extremely disappointing.
Due to the lack of a majority in Congress?
Yes, but that’s not all. The government is not in a position of strength within the institutions, so it has to negotiate constantly and has ended up governing from the “extreme centre,” including the reintegration of central figures of the Socialist Party into power. The president was not able to take advantage of the honeymoon of the first six months of his term: he staked everything on the approval of the first draft of the constitution to consolidate a political dynamic with a progressive orientation. Its rejection (by 62%, in September 2022 – editor’s note) was a cold shower. This defeat hurt the left as a whole and the social movements, which are now struggling after a long and rather chaotic electoral cycle that led to a second constituent process, dominated by the far right. In the end, this second draft of the constitution was also rejected – by more than 55% of the voters. The government appeared to be neutralized, unable to regain the political initiative.
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