Chilean election thread (?)

[Torco]

somebody asked me what's my take on the chilean election, and I didn't want to derail the thread in which they did so, so here it goes.

in the very likely case somebody doesn't know what's going on in that long strip of land left of argentina, i'll provide some context. as a disclaimer, I'm very much a lefto and thus not 'objective' i guess? no one is, but, you know, keep that in mind i guess.

so, recent history of chile (or skip to the covid in bold below): it broke off from spain after napoleon won that one time, and it's been powerfully influenced by the local oligarchy, like so many other latin american countries, ever since. more recently, it flirted with socialism in the seventies and got a CIA-sponsored coup in return, pinochet was in power for a long time and even wrote the constitution the country is run by. the constitution was written in such a way as to sort of neuter politics, in a way: the economic and political model -quite a strong type of neoliberalism- was tied up in various ways behind all sorts of two third votes through careful legal design (you make a type of law special, and the constitution says those laws are passed and changed with 2/3 the vote, but the voting system makes it so lefties and righties almost always get equal seats in congress, even though someone gets many more votes, and other formulas, we call this los amarres de la constitucion del 80). this model worked more or less for a while, in the sense that the magic number everyone cares about went up for a while, and supposedly people's living conditions improved -in reality a lot of that was credit, but there was economic improvement. this was accompanied by very poor public healthcare, very good private clinics, and the rest of neoliberalism. Eventually, however, the economy stagnated. Since the year, say, 2000 the magic number did not go up much, housing doubled in price every eight years or so, and protests over the price of education, student debt, the cost of living, poor public services and the rest of it started to become common, as did various scandals of corruption, many of them involving former dictatorship collaboratos.

So fast forward to recent times, namely 2019: there was a week called el estallido social, the social explosion i guess? basically everyone protested, and everyone supported the protesters, because well because fuck you things can't go on this way. this was the feeling on the streets. of course, *what* couldn't keep going this way was never very clear, and different people had different ideas, but everyone agreed on a few things: cost of living is too high, wages are too low, inflation, inequality, the private pension funds instituted by pinochet were basically not paying anyone pensions (average was like 30 bucks a month). eventually the right-wingers, who were in government, had to admit that changed had to be made to the neoliberal model, and now even the fascists speak of "the changes chile need" as a sort of platitude, meaning some nebulous combination of pension reform, better public healthcare, and in general social-democratic policies. of course, protests are also violent, supermarkets and churches were burnt, millions of canisters of tear gas were deployed against people (it is a chilean tradition: cops arrive at a protest and immediately gas it. it is literally the first thing they do. no, honestly, I was once *walking towards a protest* and got gassed. everyone here knows the smell of tear gas intimately, as well as recipes for treating it)

the politician's response to this was to pass a law outlining how a new constitution was to be written if people vote yes on a plebiscite: there's a catch, though: historically "two thirds" is the main way in which the right wingers manage to veto any changes to the model, and the new constitution will have to be agreed upon by two thirds of the elected conventionpeople: this is controversial but accepted and 80% of voters say yes, and the assembly of people who will write it are elected: surprising everyone, the right wing does not get many seats at all, and crucially, they don't achieve one third: indeed the constitutional convention is very left wing indeed, having many people from the communist party, a sort of coalition of neighbourhood councils type deal (yes, really, i know, weird), protestors-become-celebrities (like this one guy who disguised himself as a cancer patient to become famous. no, for real), and the student protestors of 2000 to 2010 who, by then, had become a sort of coalition of political parties, an amalgam of progressives, feminists and anticapitalist kids who learned to do politics in university assemblies. Of course, not everyone was happy with the protests: a lot of people (crucially, the 20% who voted no) were also building their own new political parties (everyone agrees the old ones are kind of shite), the strongest and most relevant of which is the Partido Republicano, republican party, yes: they're a sort of mix between old-fashioned chilean right wing, i.e. pinochet saved us from communism type people and newfangled le ebin libertarian internet kids who grew up listening to american conservative "free market" pundits. one of our recently elected congresspeople literally did the "female voting was a mistake because they vote democrat" meme. this was today's big news dealio.

anyway, then covid happened. aaand we're up to date.

so we have for president this two-round system where the most two voted guys go to second round, right? well on sunday the two guys who passed are:

a bearded dude my age (35), Boric, like, you know, a progressive millenial young man who's always talking like he's addressing a university student's assembly, extremely knowledgeable about the minutiae of the history of socialism, you know, a booksy fellow. he's not a very good candidate, not personally charismatic, but is generally perceived as an honest and progressive kid with good intentions, though the media and the right accuse him constantly of being maduro. his platform includes social spending and increasing taxes, workers on boards, and actually having a pension system like in normal countries.

The guy from the republican party, Kast, the extremely catholic son of a literal nazi soldier who publicly supported pinochet as a kid, sort of represents a "no, you know what? no we're not going socialdemocrat". he intends to keep the model as it is and just supress any further protests with police, even more privatization of healthcare and pensions and the rest of it (not to mention an 'international coalition to persecute left-wing agitators'), and is very charismatic. the lefties accuse him of being a literal, honest-to-goodness nazi, but in reality he's more like a trump or a bolsonaro, less... exhuberant and more... aristocratic?. in anglo terms, I guess he's more... posh british I guess? than your bolsonaros or your fujimoris. It's one of those things you need to know the culture to get.

three weeks and a half until second round, one of those dudderinos is going to be president here. yikes. the scenario is very complex, seven candidates in the first round, the votes of which go to more or less known places. I literally have no prediction other than that the margins are going to be real tight.

[Ares Land]

Thanks. That was really informative.

I read up a bit on Kast and man, the guy sounds really charming.

[MacAnDàil]

Thanks. I have further questions though: So would you suggest that charisma is involved in Kast's late rise in voting intention? What happened to those earlier polls showing a Communist and Humanist candidate being the two front-runners (Jiles and Jadue)? Is there any significant proportion of the 80% or 20% who have changed their minds? If the votes go to known places, who gets the third place candidate Parisi's votes (mainly)? I note also the Senate and Chamber of Deputies elections seem to have been tight also.

[Torco]

man, you're quite up to speed on chilean politics lmao. don't get me wrong, i approve.

the earlier polls were i think right, but our news cycle is quite fast. the media went all out with 'jadue venezuela jadue venezuela communism bad ten billion gorillion dead', and jiles went either crazy or performance artist: you know, stuff like offering to fuck a senator in order to get his vote for one law she (and most people, but not the rich and powerful politicians) wanted. jadue's probably gonna be a big leadership in the communist party, tho, and the communist party itself has never done better in chilean elections.

i do think kast's campaign runs on his personal charisma, as well as in his willingness to speak openly about the values of the pro-pinochet right wing (which in my experience is the right wing, but they say otherwise and it's polite to believe them). you know, kill protestors, respect police, these things are solved by an iron hand and order order order, the people made to disappear by pinochet had it coming, that kind of thing, the military saved the country and they should save it again, that kind of thing. it's a risky bet, and recent post-election polls suggest that 25% of the vote he got is basically as far as he's gonna get cause half the electorate is more people than the set of people who are willing to vote for a pinochet apologist. who knows, though.

no one knows who gets parisi's votes. parisi is mostly 'centrist' as far as rhetoric goes, but he's for the abolition of the private pension funds, and other traditionally progressive measures. he has publically denounced both boric and kast, and the kind of person who votes for him is unlikely to vote for someone else just because parisi said so: more likely, every voter is gonna choose himself, and we'll see what comes out of it: a big majority of parisi votes would need to go to kast for boric to loose, tho.

there's been an outpour of outrage news this last week about various republican party deputies who, surprise surprise, are just outright fascists. "my vote is worth more than a poor person", "women shouldn't have been given the right to vote cause they vote left", "we need to kill all protestors and fuck human rights" type fascists. this is possibly going to consolidate the notion he's a nazi, thus further limiting his votes to only the most fash of the fash. we'll see how many of those there are.

yeah, senate and deputies were tight af, almost half and half in both cases: thankfully this isn't enough to kill the constitutional convention, which is tbh about the only thing that matters. kast is sure to try and kill it anyway, though, as are the few families who run almost everything here.

novelties include a vast avalanche of boric memes, and broad support of him and his candidacy from radicals and moderates alike, except from the fash ofc. center-leaning and technocratic economists, a notable lady from healthcare, and so on. recent polls are saying boric is probably going to win, but nevertheless i've been going to some campaign groups (the kind that's let's get together and figure out how to campaign in our neighbourhoods and so on) here and I have never seen so many formerly non-political people getting involved.

Thanks. That was really informative.

I read up a bit on Kast and man, the guy sounds really charming.

lmao i know right? but he's confident, natural, relaxed and gives off an air of sincerity, as opposed to the bureaucratic speech register most of his opponents use, and apparently it's effective.

[MacAnDàil]

Thanks for the additional info.

I do check too often the polls of upcoming elections.

So there's a lot of concentration of power in a few hands? How could this be best reformed without a coup d'état being tried again?

[Torco]

in chilean electoral news, kast's father has been confirmed to have been a card-carrying member of the nazi party, a claim he has claimed is false for years. more and more polls suggest Boric is in the lead, probably cause Kast has a sort of ceiling, probagly given cause he's so blatantly fash.

So there's a lot of concentration of power in a few hands? How could this be best reformed without a coup d'état being tried again?

Boric's program is basically to get more money in taxes and use that money to fund basic social policy, thus turning chile from an uberneoliberal country into a more normal one. I think that's not bad, but it's unlikely to fix that particular problem.

Short of switchin from private property to some other more rational system, I suppose one could begin with de-commodification of various industries: for example, Jadue (the communist candidate in the primaries) started a scheme by which the municipal government opens up pharmacies, eyeglass shops and a few other things in order to offer meds and eyeglasses at much lower prices to the population: in principle, the more industries that become like this the less the oligarchs matter. another step in the right direction would be, and it might surprise to hear me say it, more capitalism: chile is not properly speaking capitalist in the sense that the ruling class rules not by virtue of having capital and having invested it in ways to outcompete their competitors, indeed there's hardly any competition at all: rather, by virtue of having collaborated with the dictatorship and having been assigned -and being assigned still- various rent-gathering privileges they rule

the AFPs (private pension funds,which are by law obliged to have more or less the same profitability, yes really) invest in their businesses, so they have capital but the AFPs invest in them because they're the owners of the businesses already (everything's a household name here: you buy in one of two or three supermarkets, pump gas in one of three gas stations, and they're all owned by the same people), the government gives them contracts (it's almost impossible to win a licitacion (request for proposals? tender? you know, that thing where the government demands and many companies offer and the government picks one) if you don't have someone who plays golf with someone somewhere: and subsidies (almost all of the profitability of pine wood in chile is because the state subsidizes it, and there's one or two big sawmill companies, owned by collaborationists with the old dictatorship) and water rights (yeah, water is privatized here, and guess who owns most of the water rights), and real estate, and, well, land, and mining rights and yeah, it's ultimately a rentier class. plenty of startup people and siliconvalley types both from here and from elsewhere routinely complain that it's very difficult to do business in chile *unless you're one of them*, so... yeah, I guess a lil bit of capitalism might chip away at the power of the oligarchs.

i gather this is not that uncommon compared to the rest of the world, yes?

[zompist]

you know, that thing where the government demands and many companies offer and the government picks one)

Bids.

you buy in one of two or three supermarkets, pump gas in one of three gas stations, and they're all owned by the same people ...
it's ultimately a rentier class...
i gather this is not that uncommon compared to the rest of the world, yes?

Yeah, I think it is. It fits in with Hernando de Soto's work, starting in Peru, on how hard it is for an outsider to legally start up a business. So the people start informal businesses instead, but then they're locked out of the investment and banking systems, etc.

Wealth is getting concentrated here too, but it's not quite so bad yet. Groceries, for instance: there was a wave of consolidation, so that two major chains, Albertsons and Safeway, controlled most supermarkets— this was hidden from the public simply by retaining all the local names (so for instance in Chicago we had Jewel and Dominick's respectively). And then in 2015 Albertsons acquired Safeway. Not good! But supermarket options have actually exploded; now you can go to Whole Foods, Aldi, Trader Joe's, Target, Wal-mart, Fresh Market, etc. Outside of tech, it's harder to make a traditional monopoly or oligopoly work here.

(Thanks for the updates on Chile, and ¡buena suerte!)

[Travis B.]

One thing I have thought about is why not have the government strictly regulate mergers, with all mergers requiring government approval (and require companies to substantiate how they would be in the public interest, require supermajority votes of the workers at each of the merging entities, ban lay-offs and closures following mergers, and so on) and by default reject mergers?

[Raphael]

Interesting proposal, but I'm not sure if this is the right thread for it...

[Rounin Ryuuji]

One thing I have thought about is why not have the government strictly regulate mergers, with all mergers requiring government approval (and require companies to substantiate how they would be in the public interest, require supermajority votes of the workers at each of the merging entities, ban lay-offs and closures following mergers, and so on) and by default reject mergers?

That would be exceptionally sensible.

[MacAnDàil]

One thing I have thought about is why not have the government strictly regulate mergers, with all mergers requiring government approval (and require companies to substantiate how they would be in the public interest, require supermajority votes of the workers at each of the merging entities, ban lay-offs and closures following mergers, and so on) and by default reject mergers?

That would be great, maybe for the Capitalism thread, but it certainly is in line with my thinking on mergers, but you go into greater detail.

[Torco]

Yeah, I think it is. It fits in with Hernando de Soto's work, starting in Peru, on how hard it is for an outsider to legally start up a business. So the people start informal businesses instead, but then they're locked out of the investment and banking systems, etc.

oh, yeah, Peru is like suuuper informal: i've a friend there and she says something like half of everyone works off the books. it's not that much here, you can relatively easily start a business, it's just you're likely not gonna grow it past a small time operation unless you play golf, or go to church, or intermarry with the right people.

(Thanks for the updates on Chile, and ¡buena suerte!)

thanks, we're gonna need it.

I don't know, having public ownership of business and market stuff but banning mergers is kind of the right hand working against the left one: mergers are not in principle bad, and if we had a capitalist system the way the old liberals envisioned it they'd be a great way to allocate resources to the guys who do whatever thing better and to increase efficiency: my thinking is more that we define by law how many different companies is enough in any given market (say, six for internet, seventy thousand for pizza) and if there's any less than that... for example you could have every one of them pay a big chunk of money to a fund, and that fund just straight up goes to starting another one, hopefully making it very easy for workers of those too-few-businesses to start a coop to compete with their former employers. that way the only mergers that happen are good ones, and you encourage de-mergers (splits?) too, which is also a good thing.

[Torco]

in chilean news, elections are this sunday and it looks like the campaigns are over. parisi has pretty transparently supported kast but there are elements of his party (currently under investigation for campaign finance fraud, but nevertheless the party with the most members on record as of this week) who call to vote boric. may the lord have mercy on us all.

[Ares Land]

Godspeed. See you on the other side.

Also, thanks a lot for this thread. The aside on the Chilean "free" market was really entertaining, and will come in handy next time I come across a neoliberal.

[Raphael]

Yes, good luck from me, too!

[zompist]

Wow. Looks like Boric won decisively:

With over 99% of ballots counted, Boric, 35, who leads a broad leftist coalition, had 55.86% of the vote, compared with 44.14% for far-right rival Jose Antonio Kast, who conceded defeat.

I think left-wing governments in Latin America are never quite as transformative as supporters hope and opponents fear, but I hope things get better with Boric, and it's always fantastic to vote down the fascists.

[Ares Land]

I think left-wing governments in Latin America are never quite as transformative as supporters hope and opponents fear

Oh, that's pretty much true anywhere, not just in Latin America.
Still, that's really great news!

[hwhatting]

Congratulations on avoiding having the clock turned back!

[Torco]

Thanks guys, we really did dodge a bullet there. Not only won by a large margin: he also won with an unprecedented turnover, 59%. hopefully this signals to the conservatives that no, pinochet apologists who defend genociders don't make competitive candidates for the right wing anymore. I was, of course, elated, but honestly more relieved than anything.

much will be written in the wake of this, but the relatively massive turnover (everyone's automatically registered to vote here) seems to have been mostly younger people, and women from all ages, from relatively poor districts, at least in Santiago. Parisi doesn't seem to have effected anything with his endorsement of Kast, and indeed the bits of the country -the northern desert regions- where he did best went for the most part to Boric, and decisively so.

I tend to agree that the Boric government is not going to be as revolutionarily left-wing as the fash fear (then again, they literally fearmongered that we were going to become another Venezuela, so it's easy to be less catastrophic than they fear) and also he won't be as purebred leftie as, say, I would want, but then again he kind of doesn't have to in order for great changes to be effected anyway: this is just my opinon, but all he needs to do is a) keep things relatively stable, b) defend the constitutional convention from the fascists boycotts and smear campaigns they've been facing and c) get the exit plebiscite to pass. with that, we should see an end to the post-pinochet neoliberal regime and the birth of... something.

exactly what is that something? probably kind of an uruguay-style economy, with trains, higher taxes, social services, an actual pension system and a relatively import-export oriented economy: hopefully one under the sphere of influence of china, who are already our number one trading partners: say what you want about Beijing but they're not in the habit of staging fascist coups. Alas, the parliament is like 50% rightwing, and many of those are from Kast's party, so it's unlikely a lot of legislation will pass through, other than basic de-neoliberalization stuff even the fascists agree with, and possibly anti-trust and pro-small-business stuff, such as forcing big business to pay their providers within 15 or 30 days, as opposed to three to six months, stuff like that.

[MacAnDàil]

hopefully one under the sphere of influence of china, who are already our number one trading partners: say what you want about Beijing but they're not in the habit of staging fascist coups.

I was going to show something about how China pressured Laos or Vietnam into worsening their labour laws but I can't seem to find it. In any case, I think the main reason China hasn't staged fascist coups (or equivalents) is just that they are only coming into superpower territory.