Anyone who forgets ends up making the same mistakes. On Monday, when we all woke up to the victory of José Antonio Kast in Chile, it was difficult to understand why almost 60% of the population had decided to bet on a candidate who openly praises Pinochet, does not deny what the dictator was or what he did, the indiscriminate assassinations of opponents, the flights of death, thus putting an end, so expeditiously, to all those who thought differently from him. A dictatorship like all the others, cruel, which lasted a long time, too long and which left its mark on a country. Until now.
There is something that is repeated from one country to another. Fragile memories of recent stories that over the years, young and old decide to forget. There are speeches which once again appeal to part of the citizens and the electorate who does not believe that this is comparable to what currently exists. Or that, seduced by speeches that only promise easy solutions to complex problems, they decide to vote with their guts and not their heads. I’ve been hearing this for many years, when we were looking during Trump’s first election, in 2016, for a logical explanation for this result. Or when we stay inside shock when Brexit came out.
Logical questions cease to be logical when too many people think that things are not going well, that what belongs to them is being taken away by those who come from outside, that their neighborhood is no longer the same as it always was, that, without reliable data or statistics, they blame migrants for all their ills. The speeches are always the same, whatever the country or culture. The most populist positions have been winning elections like this for years. The last ones, those from Chile.
When you don’t solve people’s real problems, this happens. When politics boils down to “what about you,” we once again take what’s important off the board. There are people’s daily concerns that are not resolved while these people see with astonishment that history repeats itself, that corruption, once again, corrupts everything, that some use power to enrich themselves and nothing else.
None of this seems far from us. We cannot view all of this as something that happens to others. Chile was the last country to see until recently, in 1990, how a man kept a country in fear using torture, kidnappings and assassinations of those who did not think like him, of those he considered enemies of the country. Just looking at who was happy with Kast’s win shows where we’re going. Some will be tempted to say that people vote badly. And it will be a mistake: they will vote for what is offered to them. They vote for what they forget.
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