Lectures: 160
On Sunday, May 7 of this year, more than two million six hundred thousand null and blank votes were counted, a record of more than 17% of the votes in the parliamentary election, in the period of the transition to democracy. The null and blank votes can be analyzed from different points of view, but it is undeniable that, due to their magnitude, many of them correspond to a rejection of the project generated in the “kitchen” of the Senate.
The Nobel Prize for Literature, José Saramago, in his Essays on Lucidity, recounts that on a rainy day for almost the entire day, almost no one came to vote, and in the counting of the votes the white and null votes reached 75. %: the remaining 25 was distributed among the political parties of the right, of the center and, in a very small amount, of the left. The Prime Minister of that imaginary country, alarmed by the situation, decreed a State of Siege. The election was repeated, (this time controlled by the government), and the blank and null votes increased to 80%. The Police tried to discover the command of the conspiracy for blank and invalid votes, which put the electoral stability of the imaginary country at risk.
The compulsory vote has forced many citizens who disagree with the senate trap, to have no other way than to express their protest by means of a null or white vote.
The triumph of the extreme right ensures the absolute power of the Republican Party to correct the plan of the Project presented by the Commission of nominated Experts, (twelve by the Senate and twelve by the Chamber of Deputies), and, of course, apportioned by the political parties . If we add the votes of the traditional right to those obtained by the Republicans, they would have 2/3 to reject, in its entirety, the draft delivered by the Committee of Experts.
The cleavage from the result of the elections last Sunday is limited to continuing to maintain the dictatorial Constitution of 1980, or, adding one or another shave, (similar to that of President Ricardo Lagos, in 2005), “”if they put it on me it kills me, if they take it out, I’ll die”, that is, what was experienced during the period from the beginning of the “social outbreak” (October 2019 to the present day) was useless, and in a few years Chile went from the anti- neoliberal to the hegemony of a right that has no qualms about reviving the Pinochetism that some believed to be over. The “never again” (to a dictatorship) has become a good wish, more than a strong idea.
The agony of the historical political parties, (Radical, Christian Democracy, Party for Democracy), only project the expression of the end of a cycle in the history of Chilean democracy, characterized by the modernity of the political system, and the weakness of the system economic, the latter, very well defined by the writer Aníbal Pinto in his work Chile, the case of frustrated development.
The current system of Political Parties holds a record of 29 Political Parties, (only equaled with those existing during the government of Carlos Ibáñez del Campo), therefore, the 5% of the votes required to legalize a Party is essential to end the balkanization of the parliamentary system.
In 1965 the Liberal and Conservative Parties died: the first, with 7.5% of the votes, and the second, with 5.2% of the votes. The Christian Democracy achieves 42.3%, (very close to the percentage that the Republican Party has currently achieved). The Radical Party, which in the 1940s had 20%, ended up reduced to 8.1% in the 1970s; currently at 1.5%. The PPD, founded by Ricardo Lagos Escobar, today would only reach 5%, just for its survival for its survival as a political party; Christian Democracy has been reduced to the same vote it had in 1941, 3.4% when the Party was founded in 1938. If the 5% limit is applied today for the survival of the different political parties, the radicals, the Christian Democrats and the Party for Democracy, they would go to the limbo of the deceased Parties, (they would go to keep company with the Democrats, Agrarian-Labor, Liberal and Conservative).
Leaders of the old Coalition of Parties for Democracy were defeated (with the exception of Ricardo Núñez, from the Socialist Party, who won the Atacama, but was eliminated due to parity), including the Socialist Party, the axis of the government of the current President , Gabriel Boric, achieved a vote very far from his best historical successes.
The Chilean left, after the election of May 7, 2023, has obtained one of the worst results in its political history, and is condemned to be a spectator of the deliberations of the Constitutional Council and to accept, moreover, a Constitution that in little It would differ from the dictatorial of 1980, including the “retreading”, during the government of Ricardo Lagos.
Rafael Luis Gumucio Rivas, (The Old Man)
13/05/2023
Bibliography
Ricardo, Cruz Coke, Electoral history of Chile, (1925-1973), Santiago, 1973
Rafael Luis, Gumucio Rivas and Claudio, Vásquez Lazo, The challenge of popular sovereignty. Democracy and Political Parties, CESOC, Santiago, 1988
José Saramago Essays on lucidity
