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Senator Núñez’s statement urging the government to take on the challenge of “calling on citizen pressure to carry out the reforms” not only lacks support in terms of the realism of achieving something similar, this is due to the obvious uprooting of the left. with the communities and social movements and also because in the coalition there is not even an agreement on that.
Clarification: it is not that progressivism is insignificant, which it is not – the government consistently has 30 percent support – but that the leftist people are disconnected from the parties and their bureaucratic, clientelist leaders who clumsily claim to represent them.
The question of the communist senator found a response in Undersecretary Monsalve, a socialist, who was quick to say that “it is not the responsibility of the government or its responsibility in any case to call for any type of pressure,” but rather “to call for agreements with politics and with the citizenship”.
Perhaps Núñez said what he said precisely because what Monsalve theorizes does not happen, that in terms of reforms there is no possibility of consensus with the right, unless it is on its terms, that is, La Moneda falsely insists.
In any case, it was thus expressed, once again, that between and within the coalitions, there is a sidereal distance in the spirits and purposes.
As a culmination, at least a part of the left seems to feel a growing shame of itself – of course, it never describes itself as revolutionary and always needs to clarify that it is democratic – of its centenary history in which it was able to lead social demonstrations expressed in the formation of workers’, peasants’, and miners’ unions that launched strikes, protests, and occupations of urban and rural land; to such a shameful point that it has ended up associating the concept of “social mobilization” as a synonym for disorder, violence and chaos, a consequence of being unable to understand and process the massive social outbreak of 2019.
Thus, it has ended up not daring to refute and, on the contrary, assimilate the right-wing discourse that describes Octubrism as a “criminal outbreak”, a fascist expression that seeks to nullify the expression of millions of people who took to the streets, with joy and fury, to say “enough” and to demand changes that not only did not come but now seem to be at the antipodes of what is possible.
The lack of understanding and correct processing of the outbreak was evident in the development of the Constitutional Convention, where the diverse prevailed and, simultaneously, there was no capacity and/or intention on the left to articulate and lead it.
It is of such severity that it can be said that the failure of Octubrism is historically and strategically much worse, including the victims, than the defeat of the Popular Unity, because it was never closer than in 2022 to establish the institutional foundations that would make it possible to change Chile. a wasted opportunity that will hardly be repeated, among other things, due to the immense decline that conservatism suffered in those glorious days.
Returning to Núñez’s good idea, however, it has a fundamental problem and that is that both the government and the Frente Amplio, and of course the former concertation entrenched in La Moneda, lack systemic links with social, community and identity organizations. , so for now, Senator Núñez, it is impossible to appeal to something that does not exist.
What is possible is to build those links, a complex task that generally takes a lot of time and is tested by trust in what is promised and fulfilled. That is, to revitalize and survive, the left urgently needs to humbly immerse itself in the middle and popular sectors of Chile, learn from their readings of reality, cultural and anthropological changes, only then will it cease to be a collective of enlightened elites.
It must be remembered that the best leaders of the left, from Recabarren in the saltpeter pampas to Allende in the Patagonian steppes, built their personal and left-wing prestige, credibility and historical respect of the people in political action based on the constant link with the communities and, above all, in the consistency of political behavior.
We must also remember that in recent times, the set of political forces that resisted the Pinochet dictatorship resorted to and supported a wide range of mobilizations, expressed with and without violence, -the national protests- that made it possible in 1988 and 1990 to defeat it electorally. .
What came later, the demobilization that the Concertación imposed, the territorial disconnection that it ordered its militants to practice, due to the solemn “reasons of State” of that time – the fragility of democracy, the continuity of Pinochet, etc. -, those after They became a practice of governing based on “cooked” agreements between the elites; a practice that has so far passed its mark.
President Boric, in his historic victory and assuming the presidency of Chile, promised that he would govern alongside the people, so it is time to act accordingly.
Aldo Anfossi
Journalist
Member of Socialist Platform