Lessons from an election. Opinion piece by Carlos Peña, from El Mercurio.

Carlos Peña, El Mercurio (GDA) The telephone conversation held on Sunday, after the results, between President Gabriel Boric and President-elect José Antonio Kast reveals the glaring differences between them. The former, standing, without a tie, eloquent, with an institutional speech, hiding his disappointment. The latter, wearing a tie and with the coat of arms in the background, rather terse and sparing with his words, not hiding the distance between them. This is a perfect image of this process. José Antonio Kast's victory began to take shape not thanks to a talent he still refuses to display, or to the ideas he decided to put on hold, but thanks to the rhetorical excesses and misdiagnosis of President Gabriel Boric, who squandered the first half of his term narrating the homicidal desires that neoliberalism aroused in him, while a sense of insecurity spread, the economy slowed down, and the popular sectors felt marginalized by foreign policy, the territories, the Wallmapu, multiculturalism, and minorities of all kinds. In this way, President Gabriel Boric's government created a huge gap between the expectations of the majority and the government's actions. The abandonment of universalism, which was always the central aspect of the center-left (something on which it coincides with the best liberalism), was a grave mistake, and it is difficult to understand how the best-trained cadres of that political sector could have allowed it to happen. It is true that in the second half of his administration he made efforts to correct all this (and Jara showed that the popular sectors expected him to do so); but, as has just become clear, it was too late. And, truth be told, the defeat he has just suffered is entirely deserved. José Antonio Kast, on the other hand, was sparing with his words (in fact, he reduced them to a minimum) and parked his ideas in a place from which, he has said, they will not emerge in the next four years. His, he has insisted, is an emergency government. And since the public has placed its trust in him and what he has said, the forces that accompany him must not forget that the remarkable victory they have achieved is not an ideological adherence to the right, but the result of the ideological failure of the outgoing government. The issues that the far right will be tempted to stir up—carrying on the cultural battle that so excites some of its most conservative supporters—are expected to remain part of the background culture and the public sphere, but it would be a huge mistake for the president-elect to make them part of his political agenda. If he did so, it is possible to predict that, after four years, he would find himself in the same situation as President Gabriel Boric is now: he would realize that, instead of gaining support, he would have created distance. And, of course, he must avoid the temptation to replace the lack of ideological fervor of this victory with what could be called the epic of control or security, which, if exacerbated, could create a climate favorable to those forms of new authoritarianism that are the result of uncontrolled migration and insecurity. In short, it is to be hoped that the failed innovations promoted by President Boric, or the temptation of control or the belief that right-wing ideas have triumphed, are mere disguises, distractions from a society that, beneath the immediate events, continues to have both a modernizing impulse and a deep institutional vocation. And witnessing the conversation between President Boric and President-elect Kast—despite their mutual antipathy, each exercising asceticism in their manners—there is reason to believe that this is indeed the case. The forces that accompany him must not forget that the remarkable triumph they have achieved is not an ideological adherence to the right, but the result of the ideological failure of the outgoing administration.