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Voters in Chile – especially the young – came out en masse last week to deal a severe blow to the country’s establishment political parties, voting for a hard-left special assembly to draft a Constitution that is expected to lead to a significant increase in social spending.
The Wall Street Journal reported that President Sebastian Piñera, who backs the center-right Chile Vamos coalition and is himself a billionaire, called the vote a message to the government and said it was obvious that leaders were not “adequately tuned in to the demands and wishes of the citizens.”
The new Constitution will replace the one crafted in 1980 during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, which critics called illegitimate.
As we have reported on in detail and had forecast, the massive 2019 protest that swept the country – and one of many erupting across the globe – has set the stage for anti-establishment political movements.
WSWS.org reported that Piñera’s popularity recently took a hit after there was an attempt to prevent Chileans from withdrawing funds from their pension accounts during the COVID-19 outbreak. In our 9 February article, “CHILE: ON EDGE,” we reported on the fierce backlash the country faced after police killed a street juggler.
Old News
Ariel Dorfman, a Chilean-American novelist active in the country’s political scene for five decades, wrote in The New York Times that the young in the country “rejected the traditional center-left parties as insufficiently responsive to people’s craving for a more egalitarian and overly compromised with the status quo.”
Dorfman wrote that it seems the new Constitution will likely “enshrine principles of civic participation, justice, gender equality and Indigenous rights that have long eluded this South American nation.”
The Guardian reported that Piñera’s coalition secured only 37 seats in the 155-seat constitutional assembly, which was well short of the one-third needed to block major changes. Diplomatique reported that no one in the country expected the results.
“This isn’t just a punishment of the right, but the entire political class,” Claudia Heiss, a political scientist at the University of Chile, told the WSJ. “It’s a vote that says we don’t want more of the same, we want new political actors. It is a vote asking for profound change.”
A report from Le Monde said,
“The real surprise is the proportion of votes that went to independent candidates, who have taken 48 seats, marking a rejection of mainstream political parties. This is a very diverse set of candidates, including some notorious conspiracy theorists and conservatives. A majority criticize the authoritarian, and even clearly anti-neoliberal, heritage of past decades.”
TREND FORECAST: As Trends Journal subscribers well know, what Mr. Dorfman, The Guardian, and Le Monde are now noting… is old news. Indeed, the world was blind to it, and we were among the first to forecast the “New World Disorder,” in December 2019, which was one of our Top Trends for 2020:
It’s Crashing.
Few recognize it. Most are tuned out. They don’t have a clue.
Politicians across the globe are fighting for survival against angry mobs who want to overthrow them.
Citizens across the globe are fighting for freedom and survival.
Fighting for freedom.
Fighting against government control, corruption, income inequality, poverty, violence, crime…
From South America to Africa, from the Middle East to Asia to Europe, millions are taking to the streets across the globe in numbers never seen before.
Too busy, tech-addicted, too many problems of their own… whatever it is.
From the average Joe and Jane to the top of the income chain, most don’t have a clue of what’s going on, what it means, or where it’s going.
Because if they did, steps would be taken now to reverse the pain and destruction that will follow.
Not News
The mainstream media barely reports it. And when they do, it’s sold with political/government/corporate bias.
Stuck in the past and blind to the future, dumbed down on a junk-news diet of brainwashed views, sound bites, and propaganda… the public swallows what’s fed to them.
The world is not prepared for the “2020 New World Disorder.”
Indeed, even Chile’s President Sebastian Piñera, who said leaders were not “adequately tuned in to the demands and wishes of the citizens.”
Over and over we have forecast major movements to oust establishment parties. And, love it or hate it, the new political forces will intensify, bringing in socialist governments that will attack the Bigs.