About to complete a year as president of Chile, Gabriel Boric, 37, balances on a tightrope.
On the one hand, the country’s youngest leader increasingly turns to the traditional left, which he criticized as the progressive sectors that helped him get elected proved unprepared to govern. On the other hand, the right, which gained strength with the rejection in a plebiscite of the proposal for a new Constitution, has been resuming its place in politics to the point of threatening the president’s governability.
Boric’s solution has been to walk through the center, a shift that, recalls Fabricio Pereira da Silva, professor of political science at Unirio (Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro), comes from the acts that mobilized the country in 2019 and allowed he put himself as a viable presidential candidate.
Even so, for Chileans, setbacks have been more frequent than successes. The most recent of them took place in December, when it pardoned 12 people convicted of crimes committed in the wave of demonstrations.
Although it was a campaign promise, the decision cost Boric his chief of staff and another minister and led the leftist leader to reach his worst level of popularity so far: his government was disapproved by 70% of Chileans in the first two weeks of January, according to a survey by Cadem.
Simón Escoffier, professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, defines the pardons as “a big mistake”, especially for the moment in which they were given. On the verge of granting them, Boric was negotiating with acronyms in the center and on the right a package of laws to help control the public security crisis in the country.
But the pardons, which included the release of former guerrilla fighter José Mateluna Rojas, convicted of bank robbery in 2013 in a very controversial case, caused the bloc to interrupt the dialogues.
The security crisis is today, in fact, the biggest problem for the president. Data from the Citizen Peace Foundation show that the “fear index”, which measures the perception of public insecurity among Chileans, reached 28% last year, the highest figure since 2000. A report by the Ipsos institute at the beginning of the year put Chile as the country most concerned about crime and violence in a ranking of 29 countries.
While the perception of insecurity is high, data indicate that the number of crimes per se has not increased that much and is even lower than in the pre-pandemic years. What has happened is an increase in violent crimes, something that Chile, with one of the lowest rates in the region in this regard, is not used to. In the first half of 2022, the number of homicides in the country increased by 28.7% compared to the same period in 2021, according to the Undersecretariat for Crime Prevention.
Experts credit the phenomenon with the rise of crimes “imported” from the rest of Latin America, such as armed robberies in broad daylight and contract killings. Silva, from Unirio, considers that there is also a campaign in the conservative media to explore episodes of violence.
“It seems like an eternal Datena program”, says the professor, adding that often these police programs mix common crimes and acts of vandalism in demonstrations. “All crimes are exploited like this, and they demand from the government: ‘What are you going to do?’, ‘You don’t know how to deal with this, you support delinquents, terrorist movements’.”
The result has been a great strengthening of the right which, according to Escoffier, has not only begun to copy digital tactics used by its counterparts in countries like Brazil or Argentina itself, but is also increasingly taking over the process of formulating a new Constitution, restarted at the end of 2022.
“The process was extremely co-opted by the political parties, who saw it as a chance to exclude the population”, says the sociologist, adding that even in journalistic coverage the theme lost space. At the same time, he adds, the proposal is gradually losing public support. Research by CEP (Centro de Estudos Públicos) shows that the percentage of Chileans who believe that the new Charter can solve the country’s problems went from 56% in 2019 to 37% in 2022.
Both researchers assess that the rejection of the Constitution proposal last year was the biggest defeat of the leftist administration. Silva argues that the ideal for the president is for the process to end as quickly as possible — even if this is unrealistic. “It seems to me that the Boric government will be stuck with this until the end, without being able to govern properly and carry out its projects”, he says.
Escoffier is another to claim that the arrangements for the Constituent Assembly encumber the government. Many of the president’s campaign promises had a different institutional structure as a prerequisite.
In addition, negotiations over the new document have drained its bargaining power — often, when the left wants to assert its point of view on some aspect of the text, the right seeks compensation outside that scope. “The constitutional process used to be seen as a bulwark by the government, something that would give it power. Now, it is a risk liability”, summarizes Escoffier.
The Chilean researcher does not fully agree with Silva’s assessment that the best thing is for the constitutional process to end at once. For him, Boric wants to approve the proposal to be the president who politically capitalized on it, no matter the result. But if the new Charter turns out to be too conventional, as it is going to be, the president would not have political gains, but losses.
“If that’s the case, the government’s image will be damaged, and the right, which is not in power now and therefore cannot be held as accountable, will be empowered.”
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