Kast’s proposal to reduce public spending, Matthei’s “pruning shears”, and their sympathies with Trump, Milei, Meloni and Bukele.
[By Hernán González. El Siglo. Valparaíso] The press headlines in recent weeks since the debate have focused on the fratricidal struggle within the right to see who will make it to the second round. A whirlwind of polls, each more hypothetical than the last, which seem like a game of Ludo where Matthei and Kast advance and retreat squares without substantially altering the lead held by the candidate of the democratic and progressive forces since she won the ruling party’s primary.
The heart of the differences has been Kast’s famous promise to reduce public spending by a cool six billion dollars in eighteen months, without even bothering—despite all the challenges he has faced to do so—to say where he will make the cuts.
In any case, it is the same proposal that Matthei herself was making not long ago, talking about “pruning shears”—a soft version of Milei’s chainsaw, a metaphor she used at the CEP in the presence of his very own Minister of Deregulation, Federico Sturzenneger, and the political and business elite she hopes to represent in the second round. It is the shopkeeper’s greed of neoliberal and business thinking, which, with more or less nuance, inspires the right’s programme, reaching the point of delirium in Kaiser’s programme, which curiously is increasing its flock precisely thanks to the simplistic nature of its discourse and the inconsistencies of Kast. A sort of slash-and-burn manual for reactionaries.
The stumbles of this recipe in our sister Republic of Argentina, which has Milei genuflecting before Trump—the global leader of the fascist thug squad that denies climate change, the genocide in Gaza, and threatens Latin America with warships—to secure dollars that will allow him to navigate the October elections and buy time to recover, even if just a little, his chances in the next presidential elections, have set off alarm bells for the traditional political and economic elite on this side of the Andes.
Certainly, things for the latter are not as good as they seemed until just a few months ago. Reactionary governments all over the world, including the perfumed French right and that of Kast’s reference, Giorgia Meloni, have run up against popular resistance to their austerity plans.
The only thing keeping their chances afloat for the moment is brute force. The kind applied by the Trump government, which acts like a neighbourhood bully, both domestically and abroad, to the absurd point of attending the United Nations to hand out threats and self-praise that only a character as bizarre as Milei applauds. The violence with which Macron’s government represses social protest and handles its country’s democracy, refusing to appoint a Prime Minister from the parliamentary majority and insisting on forming a government with his loyalists, despite all the evidence of his failure.
The same force that sustains Bukele as a sort of presidential gendarme or guard dog, or the corrupt, banana-republic regime of Noboa in Ecuador or Dina Boluarte in Peru. The combination of corruption, austerity, and repression, typical of right-wing and reactionary regimes—a remastered version of those so well described by Vargas Llosa in Conversation in The Cathedral—represents the last defensive wall of a moribund neoliberalism. Hence, probably, the defence of banking secrecy by conservative elites, which is provoking waves of social protest and popular resistance to the budget cuts promoted by the right across the globe.
It is not that the fascist ideology is weakening or losing its appeal for global economic and military elites. The needs of large corporations, conservative institutions, and the arms industry remain the same. It is simply that their recipe of austerity and repression has such narrow limits that it quickly burns itself out. The possibilities for a Humanity threatened by recession, climate change, and genocide are, with each passing day, narrowing and boiling down to a choice between a new barbarism, of the sort that Trump and his followers are dragging it towards inexorably, or a genuine overcoming of neoliberalism, which should coincide with the construction of a new society and not merely with moderating its most extreme outcomes.