9 colors and flavors!

A few days ago, on Monday, finished the registration period for presidential, senatorial, deputies and local authorities elections that will take place at the end of this year in Chile. Regarding presidential elections, 9 persons fulfilled all the requirements needed to register their candidacy. By this way, in November all Chilean citizens that are also living in this country will have the voluntary option of choosing the next president among 9 different alternatives!

Despite all these options come in different colors and flavors, in my humble opinion they can be classified into four big groups. It´s worth to indicate that all these groups don’t’ constitute current political conglomerates and this categorization is only a reductionist approach for describing many diverse political realities

The first group could be called the liberal and conservative option because it encourages economic freedom and is rather conservative on a political and social level. It rejects, for example, same-sex marriage, drugs legalization or substantial changes on the processes for electing authorities. The second group is a bit more liberal on “value” issues and although believes in the power of free-markets to create opportunities it considers that higher taxes on firms would help to reduce social inequalities. The third group, on the other side, embraces a big tax reform in order to assure social rights for the people. For example, this group thinks that applying more taxes will allow the state to provide free secondary and undergraduate education for almost everybody. It has been said that this tax reform will collect almost 3% of domestic product. On a constitutional level, the candidates from this group believe that the current constitution is not representative of the will of the people because it was written during the military and non-democratic government in 1980. They suggest important changes on the constitution being the most important the elimination of the subsidiary role of state. Instead, the state ought to have a more active social participation, more closed to a welfare state. The last group agrees with this constitutional amendment but it goes much further. It also proposes nationalization of many important industries like mining. They argue that big corporations operating with Chilean resources own very large profits but don’t really help to improve living conditions of ordinary citizens.  Some of the candidates from this group have said that they wouldn’t have any problems in calling to national strikes or demonstrations if their proposals were rejected by the congress.  

In the first group we have only a female candidate, Evelyn Matthei, who was the labor secretary during the present government of Sebastián Piñera.  The second group has three members: Franco Parisi, Tomás Jocelyn-Holt and Ricardo Israel. The first two are running without the support of any party and the last is representing the PRI (meaning Independent Regionalist Party). In the third group we have Michelle Bachelet and Marco Enríquez-Ominami. The former was the president of Chile before Piñera and the last is a young politician that created his own political force, a party called PRO (from the word progressive). His nickname is MEO. Finally, in the last group there are three candidates more. All of them are supported by different and rather small parties. They’re Marcel Claude, Roxana Miranda and Alfredo Sfeir.

There are two big issues in relation with upcoming elections. In the first place, many political analysts agree that an authentic liberal option, defending both personal and economic freedom, is missing between the present 9 options. The apparition of various liberal think tanks and similar groups in recent years could be a signal that these ideas are growing between the Chileans. The second issue is the present difficulty to predict the results with more or less accuracy. During the current administration the congress approved automatic registration for elections and voluntary vote. This change makes it very difficult to forecast how many people are going to vote in the next elections. Historically nearly 8 million people have voted in previous elections but because of the recently approved law this amount could go up to more than 11 million. Of course, there’s also the possibility that nothing significant occurs.

Here is my bet: Matthei 36%, Bachelet 34%, MEO 12%, Parisi 8%, Israel 7%, Claude 1%, Sfeir 1%, Jocelyn-Holt 0.5% and Miranda 0.5%. The total votes will be very high, close to 10 million! If final results are similar to these projections we will have a second round between Bachelet and Matthei where everything could happen. As you can see this will be a very interesting semester for those who have fun with political circus.