By Oscar Guillermo Garretón, economist
A balance that fully describes 2020 and its consequences is not viable. The life of humanity turned upside down. It is not even possible to cover all its implications for Chile. I resign myself to a limited comment on our political year.
We arrived in January hit by violence, with falls in growth, employment and investment, threatened with new riots on the way back from vacation. But everything changed. The pandemic came to take over the agenda. The times were not for riots.
But we also live a carbon copy of what happened at the end of the dictatorship. Then, millions were registered in the electoral registers betting to defeat Pinochet in a plebiscite. PC and others resisted; they accused “registration equal treason”, but the massive citizen option forced them to join. Now, again, an overwhelming majority approved in a plebiscite to march to a new Constitution. The violence weakened and the climate is different. The enemies of the November agreement -the PC again, and part of the FA- ended up getting on the Approval bandwagon, although maintaining aggressive pretenses: they threaten to “surround” and destabilize the Constituent Convention.
Another impact on the climate comes from a growing awareness of the magnitude of the economic crisis unleashed by the sum of the coup on October 18 and the coronavirus. The downturn in the economy is unparalleled and nearly two million jobs were lost. It will take years and many positive circumstances to return to what Chile was before 18 / O.
Thus, the political year ends differently from how it began. The vast majority chose an institutional path. And to close the year, the costume party in which the opposition and the left have lived also ended. The FA was no longer an alternative to an old left in need of renewal; shelled, extremely poor organic, has entered into frank dissolution. It has also become the avowed objective of the PC and what remains of the FA, to displace the PS and PPD from their hegemonic position on the left, contesting the same electorate, and “get rid” of the DC. They thus force the latter to abandon their follow-along and dust off some identity. Tiredness is also perceived in the population with the succession of experienced anomalies and with the unhealthy polarization of politics. A sign of a new climate is DC’s success in primaries for governors and mayors. All this permeates the electoral anxiety that already consumes the parties.
Nothing will be resolved in 2021, but your climate will be better. The vaccine helps. And the way in which the political year closes, opens up hopes of a more dialogical Constituent Convention, which seeks an institutional order that includes all Chileans and not just part of them, as some propitiate by copying logic from the Constitution of the dictatorship. .
–
