“What right do you judge, Tsar Ivan?” Asks the Tsar himself as he thinks of his enemies, Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, filmed almost 70 years ago. “Where do you get that certainty?” Asks the philosopher André Comte-Sponville a few days ago to a colleague who has reproached him for his doubts about confinement. No one can answer that these days; No one can say that there is only one successful way in a pandemic, and no one can even say that this or that case has been a triumph. This is not over; hopefully it’s in the middle. And yet, the groups that demand more and less, new or old measures to stop infections are multiplying. Worldwide. All without any certainty.
In current politics – plain, simple – doubt is usually banned, it seems like a weakness in an environment of securities. Therefore, in its lower part, the policy is to sow doubt on the adversaries. If you can’t defeat them, darken them. No one promises you a rose garden, but someday you will be rewarded.
Today, the only thing known in advance is that, along with the deaths, the economies will be on the floor. That awareness has led politicians in many countries – Spanish, French, Germans, New Zealand – to agree on agreements on the basis that as regards the virus, everyone shares blindness, but they know that the other is coming. Encouraged by economists, Chilean politicians placed themselves in that group by signing an economic-social agreement to face future months with fiscal money. A new climate, also encouraged by the resignation of the Minister of Health, was installed in the country.
It lasted a week.
That minimum period was taken to resurface social mistrust, institutional anarchization and, above all, political anger. The details of the week are too pedestrian to remember here. The substantive issues have concentrated, for now, in two groups.
First, there is a sector of the country, with representation in Parliament, that has declared the Constitution dead. Not now, but a long time ago. In his opinion, all the constitutional gear, and especially the restrictions that concern Congress, has rusted and is in ruins, from the majority rules to the Constitutional Court and, therefore, it is irrelevant to know whether the projects presented by the MPs are unconstitutional or not.
Congress works on the basis that its majority is an opponent, although a) the presidential election expressed another majority, and b) it is not yet clear how the parliamentary majority could become the basis of a new governability. But within this majority, the one that aims to go beyond the de facto Constitution and in the name of multiple causes is usually more clamorous. It is not very normal, but it has long been part of the country’s anomic climate. The fact is that now these initiatives go beyond, in an objective way, the economic-social agreement, which is precisely a definition of frameworks and projects. The oddities are a) that some of these initiatives come from the parties that signed the agreement, and b) that there are also some supported by members of the government parties.
Without looking at the prudence manual, President Piñera decided to reply to that with a special commission to study the unconstitutionalities that appear with increasing frequency, as if parliamentarians were unaware of their actions. The announcement is an interference in another power of the State, although not very different from those that President Aylwin undertook against the Supreme Court in the 90s. Piñera’s challenge adds him to an old current of counter-parliamentarism that Arturo Alessandri expressed better than anyone. Palma, and later his son Jorge. But that is another story. The fact is that relations between the Executive and the Legislative have suffered another erosion, perhaps the worst in the last 30 years, and at the worst moment of the crisis.
The second group of problems is posed by another sector – superimposed on the previous one, but not the same – that presumes the government dead. This epistemic space was born after 18-O and lasted until March, when a senator proposed the co-government of Congress with the President (more or less in that order): barter of majorities. Many people in this sector act as if Piñera had been defeated, before by the mobilizations and now by the Covid-19. A former candidate even proposed a cohabitation à la française of the President with an opposition leader. No one has explained how and by whom these responsibilities are assumed, and with what kind of legitimacy.
For a moment it seemed, when the health alarm went up, that political forces would straighten institutions – including the government – to deal with the emergency. But that axis has suffered a twist during June and the Covid-19 has also become a piece of political tension, as if the contagions, the boredom of confinement and the rise in unemployment had been transferred by osmosis to the spirit of the leaders.
It seemed logical that after the economic-social agreement some would come, for example, regarding how and when to move towards lack of confidence to alleviate the strangulation of jobs and production. This is what has happened in other countries.
But in Chile this week, where everyone has their own desire, there is no smoke of that.
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