07/11/2013
Mauricio Rojas, PhD in Economic History and member of the Academic Board of the Foundation for Progress (Chile)
The upcoming Chilean election of November 17 already has a clear winner. And I'm not referring to the person who will surely prevail in the election, Michelle Bachelet, but to the State, a State that promises to take care of our security, guarantee a wide range of rights, ensure better wages and good pensions, in sum, a big, powerful and generous benefactor State, like a mother who just wants our well-being and never abandons us.
This is the melody that has marked the race reflecting a background shift in the choices of the majority of Chileans, who seem determined to substantially change the development model followed by the country in recent decades. That is, beyond the name of the new president, this is the important thing here as it will propel Chilean society in an uncertain direction under the sign of a more or less radical statism.
The continuity proposal, represented by the centre-right candidate Evelyn Matthei, will be, according to the polls, soundly defeated. This may seem incomprehensible for those who try to analyse Chile's performance–in terms, for example, of economic growth, improvement of general living conditions and poverty reduction–since the restoration of democracy in 1990 and, indeed, during the current government of Sebastián Piñera.
However, we must remember that "reality" is not what it is but what it appears to be and that is something not decided in the field of statistics or of "hard data" but in the world of ideas, interpretations and worldviews. Or, to put it shortly, by culture in the broadest sense of the word. And it is in this area that the centre-right option has been overwhelmingly defeated by creating the conditions of the upcoming electoral defeat. It has been a long process that has had its spectacular boom in 2011, with large demonstrations that succeeded in consolidating an anti-establishment speech that challenged the very pillars of the "Chilean model": open market economy, a limited government that focuses its social interventions on the most vulnerable sectors and a democracy that establishes broad legislation consensus.
However, it should be noted that in this case it is mainly a self-inflicted defeat. Rather than a lost battle, the battle has not been waged. Ultimately, what the Chilean writer Axel Kaiser called the "cultural anorexia of the right" will be the price paid in this presidential election, i.e., their inability to understand "the power of ideas and culture as key factors in the political, economic and social evolution" (La fatal ignorancia, Santiago 2009). The Chilean centre-right believed that the efficiency of the system would automatically legitimate it and support it, they thus neglected that field where you actually choose the itinerary of societies: that of ideas.
I hope that others will learn from this lesson, because the cultural indolence of the Chilean centre-right is by no means unique.