The extreme right Chilean has retaliated. He Republican Party It has achieved in these constituents what it did not achieve in the 2021 presidential elections: defeat the leftannihilate the center and ‘surprise’ the traditional right (doubling them in seats).

He Republican Party stands clearly as the most voted in Chile (35.5%). And it will have enough seats, 22, to command the rewriting of the Constitution of the country, having exceeded the twenty councilors necessary to have veto power in the constitutional body. In second place was the Unidad Para Chile list (28.3% — 17 seats), made up of most of the parties that make up the official coalition (the Broad Front of President Gabriel Boric, the Communist Party and the Socialist Party), while the third position went to the traditional right, united in ‘Chile Seguro’ (21.2% — 11 seats).

“Common sense has triumphed; those who want order, peace and freedom,” says José Antonio Kast, leader of the Chilean Republican Party. son of nazi militantsomething more than nostalgic for the military dictatorship and staunch neoliberal in the economic field, I didn’t want to touch the Magna Carta inherited from the hangover of the military dictatorship.

Created in 2019 as a split from the Unidad Democrática Independiente (UDI) and faithful defender of the neoliberal model installed in the Dictatorship (1973-1990), the PRC represents more than just nostalgia for the bloody regime of Augusto Pinochet and his Military Junta. It shares, above all, the principles that govern the ultra-right in Europe and that define the trumpism in the United States or Bolsonarism in Brazil, in addition to appealing to a kind of similar authoritarianism the one that characterizes regimes like Vladimir Putin’s in Russia.

violent swerve Well, again, that of Chile. That he hasn’t even been four years erupted in the streets against the laws and structures inherited from the bloodthirsty Pinochet and then he promoted his current president in what seemed like a greening of the Latin American left. But among other management mistakes, he ‘got lost in the nuances’ of a very complex constitutional reform and —they say— little negotiated; that she was committed to social rights but also opened melons such as, for example, the plurinationality of the state… and perhaps she did not know sell the nation amidst a massive campaign of disinformation. Flatly rejected in a previous referendum.

“May sectarianism never again take over our homeland,” the victorious ultras cry out today. “The important thing is that a diverse majority has publicly committed to building a new Constitution,” the leftist president Gabriel Boric clings to his (new) unmitigated bump.

Although still concrete proposals are not known de Kast and his – they have until November to elaborate them – Chileans will have to return to the polls at the end of the year and choose between what Pinochet left behind… or the new extremists of authority and savage neoliberalism. The decision seems hard.