Social Convergence goes local and the DR visits

Over the weekend, the first step was taken that will shape the Frente Amplio (FA) as a single party. In the plebiscite between the two main parties of the community – Social Convergence (CS) and Democratic Revolution (RD) – it was determined by more than 80% that the future will be together. The ideological distance between one and the other has never been significant, which is why this path seems natural. However, the decision on the person who will lead the first stage of the party will undoubtedly define its profile. Although there will be elections in June, some leaders are already beginning to be heard among the Frente-Amplista ranks. And most of them are from CS.

For now, the leadership of the Frente Amplio will be in the hands of a provisional board that will seek to establish the steps to follow, such as reviewing the statutes and calling elections for July and there defining the official board. Although the conversations are not closed, The current president of CS, Diego Ibáñez, appears as the helmsman for these transition months.

From within the FA they warn that, whatever the competing candidates, Someone will be looked for who can guarantee organic work and governance. Under reservation, they admit that the task of organizing and directing the Frente Amplio will not be easy.

Voices within them have seen CS, the party of President Gabriel Boric, as more “hungry” to lead the community. And the blow that Comunes received after the Electoral Service (Servel) resolved its dissolution, plus the blow due to the Living Democracy case to the DR, would have left him a wide path to lead the main party that supports the President.

Now, the numbers of Social Convergence have been larger than those of the Democratic Revolution since long before. Currently, the President’s party has 36,639 members, while 26,117 are active in the DR. For this plebiscite for unification, CS contributed 8,410 votes – of which 6,818 were in favor of the merger – and the party founded by Giorgio Jackson contributed 1,464 favorable votes from 1,780 members.

Before the Living Democracy case exploded in 2019, Catalina Pérez was elected president of the community with 3,502 votes, and her successor, Senator Juan Ignacio Latorre, was elected with more than 5 thousand votes in 2022. Diego Ibáñez, current president of CS, was elected that same year with 6,107 votes.

Voices within Convergencia Social specify that the intentions to lead do not have to do with a hunger for power, but rather would respond to a logical step, given that they contribute more militants and more votes for this union. Furthermore, it happens that they are in a less depressed position and the President of Chile is a member of his party. They explain it with the following analogy: if Argentina, which has 46 million inhabitants according to the 2022 Census, united with Uruguay, which has almost 3 and a half million inhabitants, the latter would become a province. This, because it would become from the same country, with fewer inhabitants than provinces that are established, such as the province of Córdoba, which has a population of 3,840,905 inhabitants.

What is expected, then, following the analogy, is that there are no Uruguayan officials presiding over a country in which there are more Argentines. That is why CS has already revealed the main cards to lead the party and assume that they want to take the lead with the following names: Gonzalo Winter, Constanza Martínez, Constanza Schönhaut and Francisca Perales.

Deputy Gonzalo Winter is recognized as one of the leaders within the Frente Amplio. The different communities recognize him as a great spokesperson and, in recent weeks, he has managed to set the political agenda. At the end of February, for example, in the “32 Minutes” program, he said that “we (left-wing parties) have failed in our role of giving rise to a political and ideological dispute that makes it easier for the Government to carry out the program that we we ourselves produced and with which we went to seek the votes.”

The phrase managed to penetrate the political world and several left-wing figures referred to the case. However, in that intervention he also added another phrase that would somehow anticipate the profile that Winter would have as leader of the community: “The Government has made a mistake in these two years: in its desire for agreements, which are necessary to improve the life of Chileans (…), in the search for agreements, it has seemed that what this Government is pushing is not social justice, but the agreement itself.”

The FA recognizes him as a leader, however, they believe that Winter is not a militant who is very concerned about the party’s organization or bureaucracy, an element that would be key to guaranteeing governability. In CS, although it is recognized that the deputy is not a member of the organization, they assure that he does constantly coordinate with the party and its territorial base.

The presidential delegate of the Metropolitan Region, Constanza Martínez, is another of the figures who could run to assume the leadership of the Frente Amplio as a single party. Her presentation, regarding her position and constantly being on the security agenda, has profiled her with more transversal political work and – say Frente-Blampa sources – there would be a direction with greater guarantee of governability.

Constanza Schönhaut was a conventional constituent for the first constitutional process and, after the plebiscite of September 4, 2022, in October of that year, she joined the Government as an advisor to the Ministry of the Interior, in charge of coordinating the portfolio with the regional presidential delegations. and provincial. A year later, in October 2023, she resigned from said division to focus “in coordinating projects and initiatives to strengthen our political project and face the challenges we have“, as he said in those days to Third.

Francisca Perales is the current Undersecretary of Regional and Administrative Development, the previous position of Miguel Crispi (RD), prior to taking over as head of the Second Floor. Perales has worked in public service since 2016 in Valparaíso, during the first term of Mayor Jorge Sharp, but her political career is more relevant to this case. She was a prominent student leader at the Catholic University of Valparaíso and was part of the founding of CS, a party of which she was already vice president between 2019 and 2022. Currently, she is also part of the Central Committee of the community.

The first three names belong to the same group within Social Convergence, called Overflowing the Possible, the largest within the party. About 40% of the Central Committee, for example, belongs to this “lot.” Perales, on the other hand, belongs to De cordillera a mar, the second largest group – led by current president Diego Ibáñez – and which has a 16% presence in said instance. This is the difference – sources point out – that makes Ibáñez and his group less clear about the candidacy.

Democratic Revolution weakened

The party led by Diego Vela, along with Tatiana Urrutia, has not yet revealed its candidacies, but when consulting for the most preponderant figure of the party in the ranks of the FA, they named mayor Tomás Vodanovic. However, among the Broad Front groups, their agenda generates antibodies that, at times – they say – seem to be more their own.

A clear example of the agenda referred to is what happened on Tuesday in La Moneda, where he met with the Minister of the Interior, Carolina Tohá, to request the presence of a military contingent in the streets to alleviate the security crisis. . Despite this, the diagnosis made within the community and Vodanovic’s own close circle is that the agenda of the mayor of Maipú and that of leading the party are incompatible, due to the time dedicated to each one.

Furthermore, the DR does not enjoy optimal health, as the Maipucino mayor himself revealed after the plebiscite that determined that the Frente Amplio would be a single party: “We saw how a party that took us years to build, that we built in the streets , with sheer force, sheer force and sheer lungs, was destroyed in a matter of weeks by a group of corrupt people. “That cannot be repeated in a Frente-Amplista political project.”

For the new project, Vodanovic said, “we have to build a Broad Front that is less pretentious in the language and adjectives it uses to describe itself, and more rigorous and more self-demanding to understand that today the material conditions of life of our compatriots.”

The arrival of Commons

The party led by Marco Velarde announced yesterday that it would join the FA as a single party. Through a statement they reported that “this action reaffirms our commitment to contribute to the construction of this force from its beginnings, just as we have done since the founding of the Frente Amplio.”

Comunes later came to this union, because they had to first resolve their situation with Servel, which called them to dissolve. However, the party continues to resolve this situation and will maintain an executive team to respond to requests from the Electoral Service.

Although they are far from clearly competing to lead the community, a probable name for this is Camila Miranda. The president of Nodo XXI, principal think tank of the Frente Amplio, was also in charge of designing the communication campaign of the “Against” for the last plebiscite on December 17, 2023, where said option prevailed over the “For”.

Miranda took the stage to give a speech in front of his CS and RD colleagues after the result of the plebiscite was known.

There, he congratulated both parties and said: “We believe that this construction process is a process of an open path of joining wills, but why? Because our loyalty has to be with offering our country a just order. We have been working and traveling paths from the residents, from the feminist organization, from the work in different regions of the country, from the student movement, from the fight for water, building a space so that those of us who do not have power, have power through politics. And we believe that this is the breadth that the FA must have, and our loyalty to the Government and our loyalty to the people of Chile to propose these paths to them.”

Miranda ended with applause, greeting the attendees: “Let’s continue dreaming with our hands in the mud and hold on to the Frente Amplio.”

academic eye

Rodrigo Pérez de Arce is a lawyer and has a master’s degree in Sociology from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, as well as a researcher at the Institute of Society Studies, and highlights as a striking element the fact that “The candidates to preside over the new party are all lawyers from Chile, lor which also shows you a little which is the controlling group of that new party at this stage. Because it is a very important change with respect to the Democratic Revolution, which was practically all the leaders of the PUC.”

Pérez de Arce believes it is evident that, both due to political success and internal order, CS “is in a better position than the RD” and adds that it serves “to realize that the situation of the Democratic Revolution is very precarious, both internally and in its public reputation.”

Regarding the names in particular, he says that “The one who has had the greatest public visibility in recent weeks is Gonzalo Winter”, regarding his call to wage the cultural battle. “I think it is better explained in light of this moment of who is going to preside over this party and that it shows two things,” says the researcher, and continues: first, “the cards are already being shown between the different leaderships” and, second, , “Whoever takes charge of this party will have the challenge of give hope to a generation and a group of people who I think have been losing little by little the expectation about what his Government can do and what his coalition does.”

This, adds the academic, since “It seems that today the pillar of the left is supported by the Communist Party; and the Frente Amplio, on the other hand, has had to pay all the costs for having to reach agreements, for the President’s own reputation.”

The doctor in Political Science and director of the School of Government and Communications of the Central University of Chile, Marco Moreno, note that these names “They are rather functional and close to the ideas of the President, pTherefore, one could understand that any of these names will hold greater loyalty to the Government and especially to the President.”

The academic does not see many strategic changes in one or the other becoming president of the party, since everyone belongs “to the President’s entourage” and that ““It could ensure greater discipline of this new Broad Front party.”