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85% for Rejection, 15% for Approval. That was the vote of money in this plebiscite. Policy donors provided $ 427 million to fund the Rejection campaign, and only $ 76 million for Approval. It is one more proof of the fracture that the plebiscite exposed. The map of Greater Santiago looks like a fantasy island of three communes, separated from the rest of the population. The higher per capita income, the fewer deaths from Covid, the longer life expectancy (choose the variable you want), the more votes for Rejection.
For years now, this column has stupidly insisted on the point. After living in segregated places, having separate education and health care, and receiving different treatment from the justice and the police, the elite and the rest of Chile have ended up living in different mental countries. For 68% of company directors and managers, the first urgency in the country is to “restore public order.” Only 22% of citizens agree. 67% of Chileans expect the crisis to bring a better country. Only 37% of the economic elite believe it (Cadem).
The ruling class refuses to understand that it faces a radical questioning of its legitimacy, impunity and privileges. Even before the social outbreak, 67% of Chileans saw “a great conflict” between rich and poor. In 2020 the figure rose to 77% (UC Bicentennial Survey).
The million-dollar march, on October 25, 2019, expressed it. And the six million march to the polls to mark Approve, on October 25, 2020, reaffirmed it. Outside the island of fantasy, Chileans are not divided: they are united in calling for profound but peaceful changes; structural, but consensual.
Some inhabitants of the island, however, continue to fantasize about a fictional country, faithfully believing the stories of their favorite analysts, those who occupy second floors, business forums and newspaper columns. In 2014 and 2015 they were convinced that scandals like Penta, SQM and collusions were not corruption. Until October 17 they minimized the discomfort; on the 18th they attributed everything to infiltrated guerrillas and paranoid conspiracies, and later they described a Chile polarized between left and right; between peaceful and violent; or between young and old. As Óscar Contardo said: “If I charged for making diagnoses and had sold totally wrong diagnoses for years, I would have some modesty to appear as if nothing had happened.”
But they are still there, selling denial. Ignoring this populist moment, one in which, like it or not, citizens unite in opposition to elites. The data, says Ramón Cavieres, director of Activa Research, shows “loss of credibility and confidence of the political and economic elites, and everything that implies privileges. The population is not politically ideological, the elites are, and that generates disconnection ”. Only 20.9% of Chileans believe that polarization has increased (Citizen Pulse).
How to ignore this reality? How to deny all the evidence from the ballot box, the streets and the polls? Inventing fantasies, such as the tongo of Numen, an Argentine digital marketing company paid for by the Rejection campaign, which published an alleged analysis that divided Chile in two: 53% for its financiers against 47% for the Approval. Media such as El Mercurio and El Líbero gave extensive coverage to this nonsense, with detailed graphics, interviews and reactions. After the plebiscite (and after having pocketed the money), the CEO of the company sincerely stated that “we are not a pollster.”
While some (not all, by the way) on the island of fantasy entertain themselves in these fictions, the real Chile is transformed. The approval marked maximums in communes in environmental conflict such as Freirina (92%), María Elena (91%) and Mejillones (89%). Those communities have remade the social fabric to defend their lives, and that was now expressed at the polls. Also in the urban popular communes, participation soared to record levels since there was a voluntary vote. In the poorest of Santiago (La Pintana), it went from 37% in 2017 to 52% in 2020. The same happened in Lo Espejo and Cerro Navia, with more than half of the population voting, and the Approval winning with between 88 % and 89%.
The plebiscite managed to channel social energy into a constructive process, with a citizenry hopeful of pushing for changes through democracy, and young people voting for the first time. It is an advance to which the ruling class must make way. As political scientist Claudia Heiss warns: “The main danger of this process is that the elites try to co-opt it.”
Because after the day of the plebiscite in which we all counted the same, already on Monday we again overrepresented a small minority in the spaces of influence and power. The elite-citizen conflict is denied, or is explained from a paternalistic discourse in which, as Juan Carlos Eichholz says, “parents emotionally distance themselves from their children”.
The oven is no longer for those buns. The island of fantasy must build bridges to reconnect with Chile from equality, not from paternalism.
And not since the threat. The resounding failure of the terror campaigns in the plebiscite recalls the sentence attributed to Seneca, facing Nero: “Your power lies in my fear. I’m not afraid anymore. You no longer have power ”.
Thats the reality. Chile voted to build a common future in peace. Enough of fantasies.
