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What We're Watching: Gabriel Boric, new president of Chile
Boric wins in Chile. In the end, it wasn’t even close. Faced with two diametrically opposed choices for president in Sunday’s presidential runoff, more than 55 percent of Chilean voters went with leftwinger Gabriel Boric instead of his far-right opponent José Antonio Kast. The ten-point gap was so wide that Kast conceded before the count was even done. Boric, 35, now becomes the youngest president of any major nation in the world. Elected just two years after mass protests over inequality shook what was one of Latin America’s most reliably boring and prosperous countries, Boric has promised to raise taxes in order to boost social spending, nationalize the pension system, and expand rights indigenous Chileans. But with the country’s legislature evenly split between parties of the left and the center-right, the new president will likely have to compromise on his sweeping pledge to make Chile the land where neoliberalism “goes to its grave.”
Chile's President-elect Gabriel Boric celebrates with supporters after winning the presidential election in Santiago, Chile, December 19, 2021.
What We’re Watching: Chile’s new prez, Manchin sinks Biden’s agenda, Russian NATO wishlist, Australia vs China, Afghan trust fund
Boric wins in Chile. In the end, it wasn’t even close. Faced with two diametrically opposed choices for president in Sunday’s presidential runoff, more than 55 percent of Chilean voters went with leftwinger Gabriel Boric instead of his far-right opponent José Antonio Kast. The ten-point gap was so wide that Kast conceded before the count was even done. Boric, 35, now becomes the youngest president of any major nation in the world. Elected just two years after mass protests over inequality shook what was one of Latin America’s most reliably boring and prosperous countries, Boric has promised to raise taxes in order to boost social spending, nationalize the pension system, and expand the rights of indigenous Chileans. But with the country’s legislature evenly split between parties of the left and the center-right, the new president will likely have to compromise on his sweeping pledge to make Chile the land where neoliberalism “goes to its grave.”
Joe sinks Joe. It looks like US President Joe Biden has come to the end of the road with his $1.75 trillion Build Back Better Plan, now that Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) has announced flatly he’ll vote “no.” With the Senate split 50-50, Biden needs every Democrat vote in the chamber. The White House haggled with Manchin for months — “dancin’ for Manchin”, you might say. Biden even cut the proposed spending in half. But the moderate Manchin said he still “couldn’t get there” because of concerns about the deficit, and further stoking already high inflation. Republicans, of course, are ecstatic, because passing BBB is Biden's key pitch for Americans to vote for Democrats in next year's midterms and re-elect him (or another Democrat in his place) in 2024. It's not too late to reach a fresh compromise on the bill, but the longer the Dems keep squabbling, the longer their odds of retaining control of Congress next November.
Russia makes its demands. With 100,000 Russian troops at the Ukrainian border, Moscow released a bombshell list of demands for the “West” on Friday. Among other things, NATO must relinquish any right ever to expand further eastward, and must stop sending its troops or ships anywhere that could conceivably threaten Russia. What’s more, the Russians are impatient: they want the US to discuss these proposals right now. The US is happy to talk, but won’t give the Kremlin a veto over the choices that sovereign nations want to make about their own security alliances. The Ukrainians, naturally, agree, and on Monday President Volodymyr Zelenskiy will meet with his counterparts from Poland and Lithuania to emphasize the point. We’re watching to see what the US comes back with — one version of a maximalist response would look like this — and what, precisely, Russia is prepared to do if it doesn't like what it sees.
For Beijing, there is thunder Down Under. Tensions between Australia and China just keep rising. After China responded to Aussie requests for a COVID investigation by imposing devastating tariffs and unofficial bans on Australian exports in 2020, Oz is pushing back hard now. Canberra on Friday accused China of “economic coercion,” while cybersecurity officials publicly confirmed malicious attacks against Australia by Chinese spy services working with Chinese telecom giant Huawei. The Aussies also say Chinese intelligence vessels are snooping around in Australia’s Exclusive Economic Zone. These accompany several clearly pro-American moves this year: the Aussies have signed on to AUKUS, an exclusive military club with Washington and London that gives them access to unprecedented weapons tech, are allowing the buildup of US military infrastructure (read, bases) on its soil, and joined America in a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics. But the Australians are taking the tensions directly to China’s neighborhood, too. Canberra just signed a $770 million weapons deal with South Korea, including tech to build Howitzers — really, really big artillery guns. And even though the spat between the two continues, there is evidence that Australia, while heavily dependent on trade with China, is successfully pushing for diversity in trade partnerships.
An Islamic trust fund for Afghanistan. They didn’t officially recognize the Taliban government. They didn’t even allow the Taliban’s foreign minister to appear in the official group photograph. But foreign ministers from the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the second-largest intergovernmental organization after the UN, met in Islamabad on Sunday and pledged to set up a trust fund to address the worsening humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan. Neither the exact amount of the fund nor the contributions by member countries was released, but may not match the $4.5 billion that the UN has appealed for aid to Afghanistan amid warnings that the Afghan economy is in a free-fall, with 23 million facing starvation. The lead organization of the fund will be the Islamic Development Bank, the OIC’s in-house global lender.Chilean presidential candidates Gabriel Boric, of left-wing coalition 'Apruebo Dignidad' (I Approve Dignity), and Jose Antonio Kast of the far-right Republican Party, pose for pictures before a live televised debate ahead of December 19 second round presidential elections in Santiago, Chile, December 13, 2021.
Chile is no longer boring
My Chilean friends won’t love this, but I’ll say it anyway: for a long time their country’s greatest virtue was that it was sort of boring.
A stable, prosperous, reasonably centrist country surrounded by perennial economic or political basket cases, Chile was the staid uncle with the nice watch. The khakis-and-a-button-down country with the green mountains and the unexpectedly good soccer team.
Goodbye to all of that. This Sunday, 19 million Chileans face one of the most extreme choices that any Latin American presidential election has thrown up in years.
In the left corner: Gabriel Boric, a 35-year-old lawmaker and former student activist who has an expansively progressive vision of what Chile should look like. He wants to raise taxes to fund social programs, impose fresh levies on mining companies (Chile is the world’s leading copper producer,) nationalize the pension system, protect abortion and same-sex marriage, and give Indigenous communities more rights.
In the (ultra) right corner: former congressman José Antonio Kast, an ultra-conservative Catholic who wants to slash taxes, clamp down on immigration, and roll back what he and his supporters see as an assault on traditional family and gender roles. He opposes same sex marriage and abortion. He openly admires former dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Right now it’s a dead heat. Although public surveys are banned two weeks out from the vote, the latest private polls show just a four-point lead for Boric, down from eight points in late November. A quarter of those polled were still undecided.
Once-boring Chile is in the grip of three big challenges.
The first is deep inequality. Yes, the country’s famously business-friendly policies helped to slash poverty by 25 points after 2000, but Chile is still one of the most unequal countries in the OECD. Back in 2019, the country saw massive — and occasionally violent —protests over that inequality, which led to a referendum in which 80 percent of Chileans voted in favor of rewriting the country’s Pinochet-era constitution. A few months later, they elected a left-leaning assembly to draft a document that will be finished next year.
Boric’s answer to inequality is to rejigger Chile’s economic engine in a way that asks more of private capital in order to ensure social harmony – but at the risk of stalling the motor altogether. Kast, meanwhile, wants to double down on a model that has “worked”, but which risks failing — again — to address the explosive problem of inequality.
The second big issue is immigration. In recent years more than a million migrants — largely from Haiti and Venezuela — have fled violence and hunger at home to seek opportunity in Chile. This has provoked a backlash among “native” Chileans that Kast seized upon in the final weeks of the campaign. He wants to build trenches at the borders, restrict legal migration only to highly educated professionals, and offer bonuses to Chilean women for having children. Boric, meanwhile, says that migration should be orderly and secure, but he places human rights and humanitarian conventions at the center of his platform.
The third is democratic disillusionment. A recent Latinobarómetro poll showed that while a huge majority of Chileans support democracy in principle, only 18 percent say that democracy is working in their country right now. That frustration with the system is in part what drove Chileans to settle on these two diametrically opposed outsider choices in the final round.
The upshot: Chile is struggling with deeply divisive questions about what its economy should look like, and what “Chileans” should look like, and what Chile’s democracy should look like. This Sunday will be a decisive lurch in one direction or another.Chilean presidential candidate Jose Antonio Kast from far-right Republican Party meets with supporters during a campaign rally in the outskirts of Santiago, ahead of the first round of presidential elections on November 21, Chile, October 25, 2021.
What We’re Watching: Elections in Chile & Venezuela, Modi blinks, Chinese buffet ban
An extreme choice for Chilean president. Chileans go to the polls on Sunday for the first round of the presidential election. The two frontrunners are former lawmaker José Antonio Kast, a rightwinger who pines for Augusto Pinochet, and former student leader Gabriel Boric, who's moderated his positions from his more far-left days but still wants to spend big on social programs. Kast, who's benefited from rising anti-migrant sentiment, is currently leading in the polls, while Boric hasn't been able to campaign for two weeks after getting COVID. Still, Kast probably won't get 50 percent of the vote, meaning that things will go to a December runoff in which Boric is projected to have a slight edge. Just months ago, Chileans elected a largely left-leaning assembly to rewrite the Pinochet-era constitution following mass protests over rising inequality in late 2019. The next president will want to have a say in that process.
Venezuelan opposition, welcome back to elections. Also on Sunday, Venezuelans will vote to elect governors, mayors, and local officials across the country. More importantly, for the first time since 2017 they'll see opposition party names on the ballot. Since then, opponents of strongman Nicolás Maduro have boycotted elections that they saw as rigged against them, opting instead for street protests and external support to oust the regime. But with Maduro still in power, external help waning, and talks with the government on the rocks, the opposition is now slouching back to the ballot box. EU observers will be on hand to ensure that the vote is fair, but Maduro allies are likely to do well across the board. The fragmented opposition will be vying to hold four key governorships of its own, and is looking for promising pockets of support ahead of presidential elections set for 2024.
Modi's farm laws U-turn. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi suddenly announced on Friday he'll repeal three controversial agriculture laws that farmers had been protesting for more than a year. The laws sought to deregulate the agriculture sector in order to attract more investment and broaden opportunities, but small farmers worried that would leave them at the mercy of massive agriculture conglomerates. For months, tens of thousands of farmers have descended on the capital, blocking roads and even breaching the landmark Red Fort. The cause went global, with foreign celebrities weighing in on the farmers' side — much to the chagrin of Modi's government. After a long stalemate between the government and farmers' unions, Modi appears to have blinked. Our former colleague Akhil Bery tweeted: "This is a very substantial defeat for a PM who hasn't seen many."