Joaquín Fermandois: "Chilean democracy is still in danger"

Chile will not be the same when 2021 ends. In these 12 months it will have elected and renewed the main elected positions, precisely when the country is facing a health, economic, social and political crisis in parallel.

On April 11, citizens will choose the 155 conventionalists who will write the Constitution, the municipal authorities and the regional governors, who for decades were appointed by the Executive.

On November 21 the parliamentary and presidential elections will be held.

While events are happening at a dizzying pace with a society that feels powerful and distanced from its leaders, intellectuals seek from their different spheres to seek explanations for this process of change, which began on October 18, 2019, with social unrest .

Joaquín Fermandois (Viña del Mar, 1948), professor at the San Sebastián University, the Catholic University and president of the Chilean Academy of History, does so from contemporary history, of which he is one of the main exponents of his country.

To the extensive work of this conservative academic, which includes studies on the Chilean left and the Government of the Popular Unity of Allende (1970-1973),

Democracy in Chile

is recently added

.

Sisyphus trajectory

(Centro de Estudios Públicos y Ediciones UC), which introduces an essential perspective to understand the multiple ups and downs of the complex process of democratization of the country, from the Colony to the present day.

Question.

How do you explain the social upheavals of 2019?

Reply.

Since the end of 2019, a score of books and essays have been published on what came to be called the outbreak.

As in so many other aspects, this fact alone indicates the uniqueness of the phenomenon.

There are various explanations and unavoidable claims or bragging that it was predicted.

The most immediate recourse is to assume that it was inequality that caused it, and the frustration and anger that accompanied it.

It is not a thesis that convinces me.

Q.

How would you rate it then?

R.

I prefer to qualify it with a gigantic May of 68, a political-cultural phenomenon, although not separated from a social rift.

In Chile, from the beginning, Tocqueville was quoted in the sense that the revolutionary propensity is stronger in the first stages of improvement: "The yoke is lighter while it becomes more unbearable."

Great revolutions such as the French, the Russian, the Iranian and even the Cuban did not occur in static countries, simply backward or hopeless.

They occurred in dynamic societies that, for the same reason, saw the inherited uses and institutions delegitimized.

Q.

Couldn't the Chilean success have been a mirage?

R.

The visible and statistically demonstrable improvement in material and income from the late 1980s until recently, deepens the perception of insufficiencies.

It is true that the strong growth sustained until 1998 was followed by two less vigorous decades.

I do not believe, however, that this was what caused the outbreak of October 2019. It would be like blaming the 30 pesos, which raised the fare of the Santiago metro ticket and unleashed the riots.

There have been extraordinary investments in health and education in these decades, but without qualitative improvement in many ways.

Q.

What happened then?

R.

The considerable extension of life expectancy and improvement in the health of Chileans opened our eyes to the demand for a more agile and reasonably accessible system for the population.

The main funds have gone to higher education and not so much to basic and secondary education, where the great weakness of the country lies.

For half a century, public education has received - with fluctuations - more resources, but at the end of being extended to almost the entire child and youth population there was a qualitative decline.

P.

Added to this is the great problem of low pensions ...

R.

One of the great transformations of Chile was the pension system of the early eighties, which considerably strengthened the capital market and avoided the deficits of the treasury - extraordinary events -, but failed in its third basic pillar: the solemn promise better pensions than the traditional pay-as-you-go system.

In the second decade of the 21st, as the generations that first joined the system began to retire en masse, a

shock

of disappointment came.

Perhaps this was an accelerator of the protests.

However, it cannot be considered as the cause either.

In December 2017, Sebastián Piñera was elected for the second time with a good advantage as president, despite the fact that in his first Administration there had been a prequel to the outbreak in 2011.

Q.

How would you characterize the protests?

R.

There was certainly a social component, but I have my doubts that it was an expression of the humiliated and offended against the powerful.

Not that simple.

Social differences have been shortened in access to modernity, but the subjective foci are very strong.

As in any stage of acceleration of changes, the ascending sectors tend to arrogantly show the acquired power, deepening the subjective differences.

Undoubtedly, another universal feature contributed, which seems to me above all characteristic of our Latin American world: a hedonism demanding immediate satisfaction and a culture of the media and mass education that emphasizes rights over duties, forgetting all proportions among them.

Q.

Does Chile have connections with the rest of the region?

R.

After this there is a fundamental problem in Latin America.

In 200 years neither Chile nor any other country has become what is called developed.

Why?

Enough blaming the elites or imperialism.

We must return to explanations rooted in culture, such as those of Octavio Paz and the poverty of the experience of the Enlightenment on the continent.

Or the Chilean Mario Góngora on joy and work, different from the experience of the founders of the modern economy.

Q.

Was Chilean democracy in danger in the middle of the 2019 outbreak?

R.

Certainly yes and Chilean democracy is still in danger, only more attenuated.

If the public force had not been able to contain the violence, which was about to happen the second week of November 2019, only a very harsh state of siege, with the use of the Armed Forces, would have been able to impose order, but at a heavy price.

However, the outbreak hurt democracy by accentuating the confusion of the political class and showing astonishment in the government.

The political country started to roll downhill, slowly for now.

P.

Chile had a reputation as an advantageous student in the region, especially due to the strength of its institutions and its democratic and economic stability.

Is this still valid?

R.

Quite depressed was this fame, although that historical pattern of two centuries of pacification periods that lasted a few decades, followed by subsequent crises subsists.

Its economy has enabled it to weather the storms of the outbreak and pandemic, but its hard-won financial freedom is running out.

The disrepute of the political economy practiced will not lead to a more fruitful replacement.

Q.

Has the constituent process calmed the waters?

R.

In the end, the government and the political class - both discredited - managed to light a classic compromise agreement that, for the moment, helped calm the situation.

P.

Will Chile stop being what it has been since 1990 to date?

R.

It has ceased to be, although it remains to be seen if the pandemic does not influence in turn.

Partially it was already ceasing to be in the second decade of the XXI, when the difficulty to make the country governable grew.

Q.

Will Chile be refounded?

A.

It is the Latin American temptation, with 250 constitutions since 1810. In our countries, the Constitution has become a mantra, when not a trick or a toy, like the Venezuelan one.

A disease of our political culture.

In the Chilean case, it will be seen if this crisis worsens and opens the floodgates to complete ungovernability or institutional channeling.

P.

To what extent is the political class in all sectors up to the challenges?

R.

It has not been at the height and without a political class there is no democracy.

In such a political country, depoliticization surpassed what the Pinochet regime tried to install, through growing apathy and apathy towards the public, beyond all kinds of demands for this and that.

The relative prosperity to be enjoyed immediately contributed to the disaffection.

Q.

How did Chile turn its back on the governments of the center-left transition?

R.

Many ask this question and not a few of its former protagonists also ask it.

What was truly incredible was the transformation of the old midcentury left into a new, roughly social democratic version, which emerged in the 1980s, both in exile and, gradually, within Chile.

And the irony comes: after having starred in a huge qualitative leap in the economy –to a certain extent due to the continuity of policies with the military regime–, it fell into the same problem as the Latin American social democracy, which has been so weak.

It is difficult for her to explain herself.

She began to feel ashamed at the onslaught of the counterculture and suddenly jumped into a break with herself as the social outburst unfolded.

Q.

Has the Chilean right been renewed in recent decades?

A.

Difficult question.

There are many contradictions.

It came out of the Pinochet regime strengthened and was not mortgaged by it, but it remains anemic of ideas and the ability to project an ideology about the future.

This is more marked in the case of President Piñera, but not only of him.