Once the results of the presidential elections are known, and with the new Congress already outlined, Carmen Le Foulon (Santiago, 49 years old) is encouraged to examine the scene left by the first elections of this type with mandatory voting and automatic registration in the electoral registers. And in particular the most striking result: the third place of the economist Franco Parisi, after Jeannette Jara and José Antonio Kast.
“I think we were all taken a little by surprise by Parisi’s strength, especially in the southern regions of Chile. In the north he has always done well,” adds the professor at the School of Government at the Adolfo Ibáñez University. “But now it has gone up almost eight points in Araucanía. It targets a less ideological percentage of voters with a very clear, very concrete message that had this ‘neither facho nor comunacho’, which was its coreand very strong against immigration and pro security.”
Ask. Now the question of 2021 is back: Where are Parisi’s votes going? And there are the deputies of the People’s Party (PDG), who vanished in the previous period.
Answer. There is a big question: what is going to happen to those deputies? If we see the trajectory that the deputies had in the previous period, there are none left from the PDG: the majority changed to the center-right, or the right. We have to see what happens with them. Now, if one analyzes Parisi’s message, especially in the campaigns – that we are not from the extremes, that we are here for the people, that we are for security and against immigration (he had this idea of putting mines in the north) -, it is a speech closer to Kast’s voter than to Jara’s.
Q. In whose favor does Parisi’s persistent anti-elite discourse play now?
R. That is the most populist vein, that of “we are the people against an elite.” It is a vein that Jeannette Jara cultivated much more, who has a lower-middle class life path, from (the Santiago commune of) Conchalí, and she exploited that life path a lot. But the speech was not convincing, because she is part of the continuity government, and now she did worse than her coalition. Which is the same thing that happened to Evelyn Matthei.
Q. Nobody anticipated that Matthei would finish fifth.
R. They are bad results. And his coalition (Chile Vamos), although it has about ten more points in Congress, is quite harmed. For their part, the Republicans more than doubled their number of deputies.
Q. Cambio por Chile (the coalition that brings together republicans, social-Christians and national-libertarians) obtained 42 deputies, versus 34 for Chile Vamos.
R. And we must not forget that in Cambio for Chile the largest party is the Republican Party, which can say that it is effectively the largest party in the Chamber. Additionally, they probably behave much more aligned, which gives them even more strength. Because the problem in the Chamber is not only that there are many parties, but that there is a lot of discord within the parties. The Republican Party will probably be much more disciplined, which was somewhat what the UDI had at the beginning: a much more programmatic, much more disciplined party, which will make Kast’s task easier if he wins in the second round.
Q. Do you see a relatively favorable Congress for Kast?
R. The greatest danger they face is falling into what happened to them for the Constitutional Council: that they forget the mandate that this is an emergency government focused on crime and growth, and that having this overwhelming result they try to advance on other issues, such as values, in which they have no support, and there they get entangled. There is a potential risk of misunderstanding a mandate. But to the extent that they get closer to Chile Vamos they already have an important majority.
Q. They were two seats away from the absolute majority
R. The one who is going to play an important role is the People’s Party (which elected 14 deputies). Added to the right-wing pacts, they would make 90 deputies and achieve four-sevenths. But the PDG has often refused to define certain strong programmatic guidelines. But Parisi just said that the PDG does not owe anyone favors. And today he is in a much stronger position and what is coming in the future is the role he is going to play. Because he did not play any role in the previous period, among many other reasons because he was not in Chile much. But it is different if he assumes himself as the leader of a party and acts as such, being in Chile and participating in the debates.
Q. In what position is the right of Chile Vamos?
R. It’s something that needs to be looked at over a longer period. Last time they did poorly with Sebastián Sichel but they had a better performance in the parliamentary elections, although with Matthei they had a fairly poor performance, they are not missing or faded. They continue to have an important role, and I believe that the difficulty they will have in a possible Kast Government is precisely to maintain their identity so as not to be absorbed by Republicans in terms of the party brand. Because they are going to have to approve highly popular measures in terms of growth, crime, etc., but they will have to maintain an identity that allows them to survive, and that what happened to Democratic Socialism during the Boric Government does not happen to them.
Q. In her speech after knowing the results, Jeannette Jara presented the second round as a confrontation between the extreme right and progressivism. What room for growth can you give him by stating things in those terms?
R. The strategy required by Jeannette Jara involves positioning the axis in the same terms as those of Boric against Kast (in the 2021 presidential elections), as a fight against the extreme right, for women’s rights. The question is how much she will be able to position that, considering that she also has something against her that Boric did not have against: she is the incumbent of a Government that has very low approval.
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