What is at stake is the very possibility of democratic coexistence. With a hostile Congress and an emboldened right, a Kast government would not bring order, but a sharpening of social conflict. The task for Jeannette Jara, and for all of us, is to transform this latent fear into an epic of rational hope.
[By Jean Flores Quintana. El Siglo, Santiago] There is no room for self-deception or naive triumphalism. Although Jeannette Jara has managed to position the transformative forces for the run-off, the snapshot from election day is of a fractured country, where the cultural hegemony of progressivism has been severely challenged. The first-round victory is, in truth, a defensive trench against a reactionary tide that accounts for—arithmetically—more than half of the electorate.
We must read the new correlation of forces with acuity. If the previous cycle was characterised by fragmentation, the new composition throws us into an asymmetric “war of positions.” The maths is unforgiving: the ruling coalition shrinks from its 72 seats to a resistance bloc of 58 MPs, while the opposition parties consolidate a blocking force of 77 parliamentarians, handing them the power of legislative veto.
However, let us be careful not to see giants where there are only windmills. The right is not a monolith; it is going through an organic crisis of leadership. We are witnessing the historic collapse of “Chile Vamos” (RN/UDI), besieged by the voracious hegemony of the Republican Party and the disruptive emergence of the national-libertarians. We are not facing a unified adversary, but factions locked in a fratricidal war: the old Piñera-era guard is fighting for its survival against new, radical right-wing groups that are savagely disputing the ideological leadership of the sector. It is in this fracture that our room for manoeuvre resides.
In this adverse scenario, the performance of the Communist Party demands a dialectical reading: we are a force on the rise within an alliance that is contracting. If in 2021 the communist bloc had 12 seats, today that force stands at 11 MPs, consolidating the most sustained organic growth in the sector.
This advance stands in dramatic contrast to our allies: while the Broad Front pays the price of governmental wear and tear, stagnating at 21 seats, Democratic Socialism is crumbling and the former Concertación is reduced to an almost token presence. The PC is thus confirmed as the undisputed backbone and the ideological engine of the left, but the cost of this new hegemony is high: we have become the armoured locomotive of a train that has seen its historic carrying capacity dangerously reduced.
Self-criticism tolerates no euphemisms. The electoral map lays bare a doctrinal surrender: a progressivism that, mistaking renewal for renunciation, filed away the fundamental capital/labour contradiction. We opted for self-satisfied monologue in already conquered territories, shunning the pedagogical friction of disputing consciousness in the wider society, forgetting that a historical subject is defined by its role in production, not just its identity.
The price for this misstep is extremely high. In the North, the class vacuum allowed Parisi to offer an individualist way out of the economic suffocation felt by workers. And in the South, faced with a state perceived to be in retreat, the right managed to install its “armed peace” no longer as an ideological option, but as the only viable alternative for survival.
To this territorial fracture, we must add a structural factor we cannot ignore: the media hegemony of financial capital. The major press conglomerates have operated as the true vanguard party of the reaction, deploying an implacable “pedagogy of fear.”
Day and night, the media outlets have pushed the narrative of a country “falling to pieces,” exacerbating crime reports to sow moral panic and pave the way for a return to authoritarian order. Faced with the real possibility of a popular government, the powers-that-be have unabashedly reactivated the old trigger of visceral anti-communism, caricaturing our programme as the prelude to chaos, while shielding Kast’s extremism under the euphemism of “moderation.”
Despite this siege, the game is not over. The history of our sector is one of apparent impossibilities. Just as in 1938, when the Popular Front defeated the financial oligarchy under the material slogan of “Bread, a Roof and Overcoats,” today a wide path to victory exists if we can contrast the uncertainty of Kast’s radical experiment with the concrete certainties of our own programme.
The run-off is open because our proposals touch the real concerns of Chilean families. On wages, Jeannette Jara has been clear in her commitment to the working class’s pockets: “There is no possible freedom with starvation wages. We will consolidate sector-wide collective bargaining so that the wealth generated by companies finally reaches the tables of those who produce it.”
Likewise, on security, we have shed our hesitations to offer effective and class-conscious protection. As the candidate stated: “Our hand will not tremble in pursuing the drug trade’s money trail, nor in reclaiming public order. Security is the right of the poor to live in peace, and that is guaranteed by a strong state, not by free availability of weapons on the streets.”
What is at stake is the very possibility of democratic coexistence. With a hostile Congress and an emboldened right, a Kast government would not bring order, but a sharpening of social conflict. The task for Jeannette Jara, and for all of us, is to transform this latent fear into an epic of rational hope.
December will not be the end of history, but it will define whether the future is written with the ink of social justice or with the blood of authoritarian regression. To work, then: today we are fighting for the defence of civilisation against the advance of barbarism.