After Boric’s resounding triumph, the Chilean right seeks its direction

After the overwhelming triumph of the leftist Gabriel Boric, big questions are now being opened on the Chilean right, which is debating whether to take flight by establishing the conservative José Antonio Kast as the main leader of the opposition, second in the elections, or looking for new faces.

“This unity around certain principles is something that has to be maintained”Said the leader of the Republican Party after acknowledging his defeat, referring to the support he received from the ruling right wing.

The Catholic lawyer won the first round of November, leaving the official candidate Sebastián Sichel out of the ballot and in fourth place, but lost on Sunday by almost 12 points against Boric.

With 55.8% of the votes and only 35 years old, the former student leader is the youngest and most voted president-elect in Chilean history.

“It is not a passenger”

A 16-year-old deputy and a member of the UDI for two decades, the largest of the four groups that make up the official coalition Chile Vamos, Kast founded the Republican Party in 2019, which in November won 14 deputies and a senator: “This project is not temporary”, Affirmed Sunday.

Despite the political capital that he has garnered in a short time, Kast has begun to lose support and there are already experts who predict a “fratricidal war” by the leadership of the right.

“Defeats always open fractures on the losing side and the temptation to exclusively blame Kast is great because he has lost by many votes”Declared Rodrigo Pérez de Arce, from the Institute for Society Studies (IES).

This, in his opinion, is not entirely accurate, as the center-right had to turn twice to candidates outside its conglomerate “to fill its leadership void”, first with the moderate independent Sichel and later with Kast.

The lawyer, who raised the flag of order, the homeland and the traditional family during the campaign and promised a strong hand against migration, was especially punished in Santiago and by young people and women, attracted by Boric’s promises of change.

For Mauricio Morales, from the University of Talca, the far-right “added everything he could add up and got the same votes as (outgoing president) Sebastián Piñera in 2017.”

Despite the obvious defeat, analysts agree that the right is not in its lowest hours and assure that it bottomed out in the wave of protests in 2019, the most serious since the military dictatorship, and in the May elections to elect the conventional ones who are writing the new Constitution, when it only took 37 of the 155 seats.

“The right wing has recovered in some way in this second round, but it has been traversed since the outbreak, precisely by those two souls that coexist in its midst: the most identitarian and extreme and the other more social”Explained Julieta Suárez-Cao, from the Catholic University.

“The fact that the right wing, which was on the ground a year ago, went to the ballot in itself is a victory“Added Pérez de Arce.

Back to the center?

Complacent with the Augusto Pinochet regime (1973-1990) and compared to the Brazilian Jair Bolsonaro, the radical positions of Kast sting many Chileans “who had not participated in the first round and opted for Boric in the ballot”Morales indicated.

The great dilemma of the right is, therefore, whether to remain united around Kast or to build a new story that connects with that moderate Chile that went to the polls.

“An important part of the right believed that Piñera’s agenda ended up being of the center left and was blamed for not having been tougher in the outbreak. It’s a moment of redefinition”Suárez-Cao pointed out.

The creation of a new coalition in which the Republican Party and Chile Vamos are integrated is something that a priori the director of the Center for Public Policies of the Universidad del Desarrollo, Gonzalo Müller, rules out, who is committed to “a peaceful coexistence and a parliamentary coordination between the two ”.

Senator Felipe Kast, nephew of the Republican leader and former president of Evópoli, the most centrist party in Chile, said the same thing this week: “It is healthy that there are different rights “.

The dance of names has not been long in coming and among the faces that resonate to lead the call “social right”Are the deputies Diego Paulsen, Diego Schalper or Tomás Fuentes, from the same generation as Boric.

According to Pérez de Arce, the new leadership “he must have territorial experience, connection with real Chile and conviction of the importance of a healthy reformism ”.

Para Müller,Parliament is likely to become a pool of new presidential candidates”, Since the left and the right are almost even and Chile Vamos has 54 deputies and 24 senators.

Experts agree that regardless of who takes the helm, the opposition must be “constructive and generous, but firm.”

“There is a convention on the right –Müller concluded– not to repeat what the Broad Front of Boric did with Piñera because of the ungovernability that this produces. “