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The only time that the former minister and vice president of the PPD, Francisco Vidal, was a candidate for a popularly elected position was in the 1992 municipal elections. “It was in the ‘Sierra Maestra’ on the right: Las Condes,” he says, and releases a laugh. “Obviously I lost and it was with dignity,” he recalls. Now he is determined to put on the candidate’s suit again: after the October plebiscite he will decide whether he will be a candidate for regional governor or will join the race for La Moneda.
Several elections are coming in the next few months. Why have you been reluctant to be a candidate?
Parliament is not something that attracts me substantively. It is fundamental, obviously, but since I went to Congress for eight years as a minister, I was registered with Valparaíso. It is not my calling. The political vocation that I have is in executive positions or in partisan positions, so reviled today.
Will you be a candidate this time?
I am reserving myself for a post-plebiscite decision. I read, I once commented on it, an email that came out of the Congress of regional governors and in my opinion it is a disaster. However, I think that you have to make that choice, because there were some pillines who wanted to postpone it once more, and secondly, I think that the regional governors the next day are going to form a trade association and go to La Moneda and Valparaíso to ask more resources and powers, with one big difference: the regional governor of Santiago is going to have a million votes behind him. That is why I am looking at the presidential option or the regional governor option, but after the plebiscite.
Why is the opposing unit so elusive?
It is elusive because in the political logic, identity, which is natural and legitimate, is privileged over a superior good that is the unity to build a project for a different country. The left has a tendency to fragmentation, privileging identity a lot. Our thesis today is that maintaining identity, which is the fundamental essence of a party, must make an effort to subordinate it to a common effort, among other things, because with everything that one wants identity, in my case of PPD, the PPD alone cannot win any substantive election, neither the PS alone, nor the communists alone, nor the radicals alone, nor the DC alone, nor the Broad Front alone.
So that unit is from the DC to the Broad Front …
I have always been a supporter of the broadest and widest unity based on a common content floor.
Is unity hampered because the candidate who appears best positioned in the polls is a communist figure?
What happens is that this is the reality today and I am about to transform that reality. I want to compete with Jadue in an eventual primary if he took the presidential option. The communist vote is at 5%, that’s the communist electorate, and Jadue is scoring 15%. It means that there are 10 points of citizens who voted for us and that today they are saying Jadue, among other things, because they still do not see clearly, in the socialist, radical or PPD world, a leadership that competes with Jadue democratically, all together , in a primary that allows us to face the right in November of next year.
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I ask you in another way: If it were a PS or a PPD, the best positioned would have the same difficulty in the unity process?
It puts an ingredient of excessive radicalism and my reading is that Jadue is completely legitimate as a candidate, but the reading is that the country requires profound changes and a gradual procedure. My thesis is gradual deep change, not immediate deep and radical change.
Is Jadue right when he says that there is an anti-communist spirit in some leaders of the Chilean left?
You’re right, because there were also fundamental differences between us and the PC in recent history.
Do you think that the New Majority was a good experience?
No. It was a good project, in my opinion, a good inspiration, a transformative program that had a problem: halfway through it was run by people who looked at that program very conservatively, to put it gracefully.
A UN report came out that establishes that the government of Nicolás Maduro violates human rights and commits crimes against humanity. Does this international issue complicate Jadue’s chances, taking into account his position in favor of the Venezuelan government?
Personally, Venezuela has long been a dictatorship for me. And China is also a dictatorship, and it is our main trading partner. Does that view of foreign policy and the principles that one defends in Venezuela and China alter or modify the need to build a majority government in which you require the CP to be a majority, either in the first or second round? We must recognize the difference that is substantive. But that difference, with respect to how the world views Venezuela and China, should not alter a behavior in Chile, that we all respect the democratic system as it is understood in the West, which does not apply in Venezuela or China. Who on the left today in Chile says they want Maduro’s model for Chile? Not the PC.
You have made a kind of duo with Lavín. Does that imply you give many explanations to your political partners?
I spent four and a half years, every day, from Monday to Friday, in a daily program called Poles Opposites and I am a witness to Lavín’s evolution. I asked the air: Would you vote for Pinochet again? He said no. I asked him if he would go again to see Pinochet carried by a wing by Longueira? He said no. And she is a person who is convinced. So I say what I think. Whether my friends like it or not, it is my conviction. That simple
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