I don’t know if you have seen the film No, directed by Pablo Larraín, in which a magnificent Gael García Bernal plays the young publicist who is entrusted with the campaign for the no vote in the 1988 plebiscite that, eventually, would be key to ending the terrible Pinochet dictatorship. I liked it when I saw it, more than a decade ago. I found it happy and emotional and, nevertheless, I remembered it with nostalgia the other day reading what is happening today in Chile. Don’t ask me why, because it is not only absurd, but indecent, to feel nostalgia for a past that was, no matter how you look at it, much worse.
But, although one cannot speak of nostalgia, there is a certain unease seeing how the monosyllable policy is operating in Chile today. We must go back four years, to the social outbreak that took place in October 2019. As always, the unrest is multidimensional and can only be understood by getting into long-term coordinates and long-range solutions: those that are difficult to articulate and slow to implement. However, they were summed up in a single request: to write a new Constitution. This is what up to 80% of Chileans demanded in the October 2020 entry plebiscite.
The new Constitution, drafted through a constitutional convention very biased to the left, was rejected by a large majority (62%) in the ratification plebiscite of September 2022. Now it is the right, which obtained an absolute majority in the new constitutional commission, who has presented a completely different Magna Carta project, which must be ratified in a referendum on December 17. This second draft of the Constitution is opposed by almost the same percentage of Chileans who rejected the previous one last year.
Only those who support or reject have exchanged roles. The left, which summed up its evils in overcoming the 1980 Constitution, which they called Pinochetist, ignoring that it had been democratized and reformed up to 63 times, today dreams of keeping that constitutional text. The right, which opposed any change that would respond to more than obvious challenges, is today the promoter of the new law of laws. From yes is no to no is yes.
Although we do not know what will happen on the 17th, what we do know is that it has been impossible to achieve a national consensus on the new rules of the political game and that there is only consensus on one thing: that there will be no more open avenues for reform in a discouraged country. with the process and today basically worried about the feeling of insecurity. Only 22% of Chileans are optimistic about the future.
There are many lessons to be learned from the Chilean process that we would do well to internalize, here too. The contempt for consensus, the polarization against something as the only political offer, this unhealthy insistence on summarizing a country project in a monosyllable and this declarative hyperventilation that hinders what we all know: that we govern in prose.
The effects are not harmless. Claudia Vallejo, the current spokesperson for the Chilean Government, summarized them better than anyone: “One can respect the criticism of the current opposition regarding our role in the opposition of the time, but the question one has to ask oneself in the face of that criticism is whether That gives them the right to be equal or worse than us. If in politics we go with an eye for an eye, we are all going to go blind. And again, those who lose are the people, democracy, and institutions.” It is said.
