The strategy for the victory of the leftist Gabriel Boric in Chile was to have several strategies, “each one appropriate to a moment of the campaign”. So Sebastián Kraljevich, 41, tells leaf about how his team thought about the political communication of the country’s newly elected president.
The Chilean sociologist, a specialist in political marketing and based in Washington, has worked for other left and center-left presidential candidates in Latin America, such as Ecuadorians Rafael Correa and Lenín Moreno, as well as Chilean Beatriz Sánchez, who lost in the 2017 race. He also worked with regional candidates in Mexico, Peru and Argentina.
With Boric, he had already worked in 2013, when he directed his successful campaign for deputy.
In an interview conducted by videoconference, Kraljevich says he does not believe in “selling images” of candidates, but rather in “highlighting their positive characteristics at the right moments”.
Following the election campaign, it seems that there were several moments of change in the strategy on how to sell the candidate, in terms of marketing. More than selling, I always work on reinforcing the important points at every moment. In the candidate’s characteristics that are essential to highlight at each stage of the election. Gabriel Boric is one person. Therefore, the way we were emphasizing its characteristics was the campaign game, a game that we had to win with its own characteristics.
I don’t think of it as a sales process, but as an observation of how society and voters behave and react. You cannot turn a candidate into a person he is not.
Yes, but there is talk of a process of “moderating” his speech, from the first to the second round, in search of centrist voters, which was successful. Mr. don’t you see it like that? Before starting the campaign, in the image surveys we commissioned, Boric was classified as “yellow”, which in Chilean political language is how you define someone who is between moderate leftism and more modern rightism. That was his image before the election, although it seems forgotten today.
It should be remembered, for example, that at the time of the 2019 protests, when he defended the path of dialogue with the government, he was called a traitor by the so-called “extremes”, who did not see him as radical enough. In other words, when they began to repeat, within Chile and even among international public opinion, that Boric was a “radical”, a “Chavista”, our strategy was to recover and reinforce how he was seen before the election and the disinformation campaigns. of the opposition.
Boric is a “dialoguer”, he is a moderate leftist, and he was seen as such by Chileans since his performance as a deputy and defender of the student movement. What happens is that there is a lot of media noise in campaigns and a lot of simplifying opinions, especially on the networks, which are repeated and consolidated without people having enough information to process them. We didn’t have to moderate Boric, but rather highlight what he already was.
But in the clash he had with Sebastián Sichel [candidato governista], for example, in the debates, we saw a more radical facet, didn’t we? I wouldn’t say radical, but more aggressive. This is where what I said about the strategies needed for each moment of the campaign comes in. If Sichel passed to the second round with Boric, the result could be another, negative for us. Therefore, in August, our focus was to put efforts into deflating Sichel. It was necessary to be vocally critical of the [atual presidente, Sebastián] Piñera, who supported him. But that wasn’t any different from what Boric already did or how he thought. He was always very critical of Piñera’s management, we just increased the volume of criticism.
The strategy there was to point out Sichel’s contradictions, to shed light on the fact that he had withdrawn funds from pension funds when his party voted against it. And he acknowledged receiving the criticism. Ended up dropping 15 percentage points [nas pesquisas] in just two weeks. It was time to act to avoid a second round between Boric and Sichel, and that’s what we did. But using resources that are Boric’s, we never put words in his mouth, something he wouldn’t even allow.
Was there a change brought about by the departure of Sichel and Yasna Provoste (from Christian democracy), defeated in the first round? Yes, the departure of both allowed us to show a less elitist Boric — although he is not elite, compared to these two, he was. She comes from a wealthy family in Punta Arenas, while Provoste was of indigenous descent, a physical education teacher born in a village in the north. And Sichel grew up in a hippie community and was abandoned by his biological father. Countering these biographies did not give Boric an advantage in the first round.
But in the second round, with the departure of both, we were freer to explore the fact that Boric was not a classical elite either. Starting with the fact that he is from the south of Chile: in a country so aristocratic in politics, not being from Santiago already takes a lot away from power. We accentuated this and tried to make him move around the country more. We occupied the space of the speech of Sichel and Provoste and, outside the campaign, we were looking for voters who would naturally oppose the candidacy of [José Antonio] Closet.
That’s why it’s important to measure perceptions at all times during the campaign. Once both were out of the running, we were free to reinforce our speech among their constituents, which was closer to them than Kast’s.
What weight did it have on the final result to have been in second place in the first round? It frustrated us a lot, there was a lot of optimism. But looking back now, I don’t think it was entirely negative. The fact that Kast appeared first showed many that the threat was real. The election stopped being abstract for those who didn’t care so much about voting, it mobilized people who might not go to the polls.
The second place in the first round united the militancy to ward off the danger of a Kast presidency. Fear counted for a lot, and it wouldn’t have come up with that intensity if Boric had taken the lead in the first round. The story could have been different. I say this now, that it has passed, but receiving the news was a scare. Boric was the most positive about it and took the reins of the turnaround, and that was clear, which served to gain the trust of many people who did not see him as a possible leader.
The Kast family’s ties to Nazism and his defense of Pinochet were topics much explored by the international press. In Chile, were there really factors that contributed to your defeat? in part. These were present issues, of course, but Kast lost for other reasons as well. He believed that voters in [Franco] Parisi [terceiro colocado, direitista liberal] they would go to him just because they both have an anti-immigration rant. Northern voters, who primarily voted for Parisi, are anti-establishment, against Santiago’s conservative political profile, which was represented by Kast.
But more importantly, Boric showed that Kast was a candidate who didn’t talk to people who didn’t think like him. Boric did very well in the debates when he exposed this, and Kast had no response. It was also a misguided strategy by Kast to cling to Piñera’s right, because that electorate did not follow them.
And I think last but not least, Kast played down the strength of the female vote against him. Feminism has grown a lot in Chile, it is a flag that has no turning back. Defending non-feminist agendas, not being aligned with this agenda, not having important women on his team, being against the Ministry of Women, were a big mistake by Kast.
X-ray | Sebastián Kraljevich Chadwick, 41
Born in Santiago, he studied sociology at the Universidad de Chile, with postgraduate degrees at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and in politics at the Georgetown University (USA). He worked for Fenton Communications, a US political communications company.
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