Elections Chile votes after two hectic years of political upheaval
In a world addicted to the instantaneous, there is something that haunts the Chilean president, Sebastián Piñera: the label of "worst government in history" that his adversaries insist on hitting him. After the elections this Sunday - the most polarized of the last three decades and in which the hard right of
Juan Antonio Kast
was emerging as a favorite along with the radical left of
Gabriel Boric
to go to the second round on December 19 - you will know better how difficult it will be for the head of state to moderate that stamp. But there is one thing that many agree on. If it is a "legacy", what Piñera leaves behind is a great success with the vaccination plan against the pandemic. And not much else.
The president leaves office with a country split between extremes two years after the social outbreak of 2019.
Fifteen million Chileans were called to the polls today to
choose the model for the future with which the country recovers stability, in the midst of the constitutional process to redesign its political foundations.
"Chile has had a fairly effective vaccination process
. I think that is its main, if not only legacy,"
Lucía Dammert
, a specialist in Latin American Studies at the University of Santiago de Chile,
tells
EL MUNDO
.
Rodrigo Delgado
, Piñera's Minister of the Interior, denies it and assures that there was much more: "The legacy of this Government is related to those causes that matter most to Chileans. Public safety, health, public works, sports, education and so many other issues related to deep Chile ".
Thus,
the Government produced an institutional video of three and a half minutes entitled "bicentennial legacy"
, which, after glossing the first Government of Piñera (2010-2014), states that the 2018-2022 project aims to "promote development with specific projects of the cities, oriented towards improving the quality of life of the families of today and tomorrow ".
Sweetened words that were shattered from the popular revolt of October 2019, which fundamentally changed the political landscape of the country.
A Constituent Convention is in session that is preparing a Magna Carta almost antithetical to Piñera's Chile project, which, on the other hand, it ignores.
This convention, chaired by the Mapuche leader
Elisa Loncon
, is a parallel power that designs the Chile of the future.
And Piñera,
with approval levels below 10%
, is a mere spectator.
As it was of the electoral evolution, with his group, embodied in the candidate
Sebastián Sichel
, quite beaten.
The "worst government in history" is worrisome in La Moneda, says the site elmostrador.cl, especially because that is the same label that Piñera, who will leave power at 72, wanted to put the second government of
Michelle Bachelet
( 2014-2018). Gabriel Boric, the hard-left presidential candidate, believes that Piñera's "will be remembered as one of the worst in Chile for his sad performance on human rights and the worsening conflict between the state and the Mapuche people."
Piñera is the only Chilean president subjected to two impeachments - he managed to overcome both - but after leaving the Government, he
may face problems with the ordinary justice system
. Businessman and one of the richest men in Chile, he is not believed to continue in politics and it is expected that he will recover some of his businesses and companies. The management revealed by the Panama Papers complicates Piñera, who after his first term bought 118,000 hectares in the south of the country: forests, hills and lakes. Some time later he would inaugurate "Parque Tantauco" there.
"The park is the closest thing to earthly paradise that I have found in this world," said Piñera at the time. His critics point out that the paradise has more to do with the
'offshore' in tax havens, to which he appealed for the purchase
.
Despite the fact that in his second government he tried to use social networks to show himself closer and more relaxed, he failed. Also in the idea of governing from a "right without complexes." And, again, October 2019 was the breaking point.
"The worst has been his disconnection with the public,"
Sebastián Varela Nahmías
, a journalist who lives part of the year in his country and another part in Australia
, tells this newspaper
. From close up and from afar, he saw the same thing: "When Chile exploded, the president was in a restaurant eating pizza. The human rights violations in the demonstrations and the nefarious handling of the police have been the worst."
"In his government, social inequalities worsened, which led the entire country to catch fire in a social outbreak," recalled elmostrador.cl.
"Under his mandate, the military took to the streets again to reimpose public order (...), the most serious human rights violations occurred since the return to democracy.
And he has been the only head of state since Pinochet in talk about war ".
Dammert believes that Piñera "practically leaves the base of the right wing destroyed", in part because "he failed to develop any of the structural reforms that the government itself recognized as important."
And he ended up being forced to take economic measures far removed from those he proposed.
That baffled his voter base and grew Kast's hard right.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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