translated from Spanish: Governors: communication minority and failed second round without coalitions

After two decades of a counter-hegemonic debate in favor of greater regional autonomy – since the creation of Los Federales 1999 and then the Regionalist Bloc in Congress in 2002 – the all-encompassing power of the centralist delegation in the macroterritories has been broken. The election has been held with enormous resistance from the Piñera Government, which minimized it to the maximum by denying the public space for deliberation and in the null transfer of competences and creation of solid financing to them, which the New Majority did not fulfill in the second Bachelet Government, despite having been part of its program and unanimously endorsed by the State Commission for Decentralization of 2014.
But there was also a blunder by Chilean presidentialism, since only in 2 of the 13 regions that went to the second round – Atacama and Los Ríos – was there a programmatic coalition “seriously,” in which the candidates for governor agreed on programmatic elements and commitments with collective political actors. In the other cases, the hegemonist model was followed and it was possible to win by “fear of the left” in the RM or by “anti-rightist inertia” in most regions.
The government boycott
The spirit and letter of the Law on Strengthening Regionalization, enacted at the beginning of 2018, were categorical: the Government that took office in March of that year, would have two years to install the new divisions of the Regional Governments and make a transfer of competences – programs, personnel and resources – in the thematic areas consistent with the three new divisions: Infrastructure and Transport, Development and Industries, Social Development. In addition, it would implement the Regional Land Management Plans in the face of the climate disaster and the high socio-environmental conflict, as well as implement plans for decontamination and disposal of garbage, and create the urgent metropolitan governance in charge of the Gores, in coordination with the key ministries (Housing, Transport, Public Works) and the respective councils of mayors. 
Piñera opted for the only party that voted against regional strengthening: the neoliberal trade unionism of the UDI, which understands the subnational only in the subsidiary assistance and “administrator” of services, avoiding all power in the development model. No binding planning, no public companies, no integrated transport models, no productive promotion, no territorial power in waters and basins.
All they have done is create the divisions. They call for a contest to “take over” the few positions created of professional personnel, they sent decrees calling for the transfer of “competences” to the Gores who do not have funding.
The metropolitan areas were not created, the intergovernmentality in them, composed of the Gore, the respective municipalities and the ministerial delegations, was not made to walk. And most seriously, instead of giving resources by law to regional governments with structural convergence fund, they urgently sent a fiscal responsibility law, which further stifles limited regional action.
The 2014 Commission agreed on the request for the transfer of Corfo, Serviu, Indap, Fosis, Sercotec, Sernatur to the territorial system, but it has had the veto of the transversal centralist duopoly. In this way, the elections of governors were held without a transfer of competences – which by law can be requested from March 2022 – and without rents, with announcements of “chaos” due to the existence of presidential delegations and the typical comments of those who have done nothing for regional empowerment – UDI and half of the PPD/PS – that the process is bad and incomplete.
Communicational minority
Already in the first round, it was noteworthy that there was no fringe for the regional governors, whom we managed to demand the presentation of a government program, precisely in order to get out of the presidential banal marketing and force relevant definitions with the territory.
The National Television And TVN Council, dominated in its councils by the traditional right-wing pact and the Coalition, did not make any agreement with the Executive to include “the historic election of governors” in a relevant place in the debates and public sphere of the “local, regional, and constituent super-election.” TVN only held a brief debate by region without being announced and at mid-morning, not even using one day its regional news slots, which all Chileans pay with their taxes. 
The choice in the RM it captured 80% of the news space before and during this election. This opens the debate of plural and non-co-opted communication spaces in the regions, which include the transmission of the decisive debates of the regional councils, throughout the cycle of relevant policies that will come in mobility, environment, productive diversification and green economies.
Low vote, “personalist structural failure” and absence of coalitions
The fifth axis of work of the Commission for Decentralization was participation. There was incubated the progressive federal idea of demanding a program, the possibility of recall and a collegial model of electing governors or at least achieving a second round, so that there would be a regional party system.
The ten most egalitarian countries in the world are federal or highly autonomous territorial (Scandinavia) and parliamentarians “far” from banal, co-opting and self-centered presidentialism. In these countries – the USA is out because of its greatest inequality in the last three decades – Congress elects the prime minister, the regional and local assemblies, the governors and mayors. Chile had a positive tradition of electing mayors by aldermen, who often in the construction of local coalitions divided the term into two mayors – think of the “plural” coalition agreement of these days in Israel. The reviled parliamentary term, instead of correcting it – due to the excessive ministerial rotation – became the presidentialism that has done Chile badly and is replicated in the mayoralization of municipal management and in the arrogance of many candidates for governors who sought to create coalitions outside their groups of origin. 
Part of the weariness with politics in Chile is because of this hyperinflation of candidacies with posters and the little well-articulated programmatic debate. This dimension of the political system will be debated in the new Constitution and we recommend the system of tuition in the three levels of government, where the first of the lists debate in the elections –previous democratic definitions of parties and territorial platforms allowed–, which forces to “agree”, to be government, agenda priorities without “blank check” to candidates or votes for “fear”.
Let’s apply it to emblematic cases in these elections of governors with low votes and in which there were and “were not” programmatic territorial agreements, and candidates who obtained less than 25% in the first round won, which clearly called for them to come out of their trenches and seek greater alliances. 
In the case of the Metropolitan Region, it is evident the weight of the eastern sector of the capital in the vote of Claudio Orrego, which does not detract from the merits of the candidate, but would have been “more sincere” than Orrego, who believes in the center-right coalitions – dc sector that has raised it and he who has supported the colorado national pact in Uruguay– , would have convinced Unidad Constituyente of a governance pact with Chile Vamos and the rural sectors, where what they agreed to is “known.” In the presidential system there are no explicit coalition negotiations, but there are the “personal” calls of Lavin, Sichel, and Ossandón to prefer Orrego, instead of the suspicion of an agreement “in the weight of the night,” which may leave intact the tax privileges of the so-called rejecting communes and, in this way, turn the Phalangist’s shift to “territorial and environmental justice” into lyrical. 
On the opposite sidewalk, Karina Oliva maintained her speech and program of the “new” left –all the rest is more of the same–, urban and feminist, without agreeing with collectives in rural areas, without including FREVS, which offered it to her, also clashing with the solo alternativist path of the environmentalists, whose candidate – third in the vote and with consistent traceability in environmental legal advice – argued the lack of clear definitions of Oliva in the diversity of environmental issues. 
Claudio Orrego was more effective in the rural and environmental, added to the right-wing fear barrioaltino, and achieved victory “without creating a new coalition,” which in developing countries implies program and part of power. The classic example is the German Greens who made watermelon coalitions (red and green) with the Social Democrats, starting from municipalities and two lands (regions), to then be national by 2000 and demand the “new German miracle”: a strict and active environmental policy, air conditioning of homes, mobility and energy saving, which caused local and national laws that have been reducing its energy consumption for two decades.
Just as Oliva, Eugenio Tuma and the PPD failed to put together an obvious coalition to be made with the left-wing candidates.erdistas, regionalists, environmentalists and Mapuche antiextractivism, who added 40% in the first round. There was no talk of plurinationality, freedom for prisoners, the privilege of traditional peasant and indigenous agriculture, “without a transformative narrative,” as Vicente Painel told us. Thus, in the “independentist” fashion, the “young” and “moderate” center-right candidate (Evopoli), mobilized urban professionals and triumphed.  
If the elections of governors in La Araucanía (Wallmapu) had been by means of a majority in the regional council, there would have been negotiation with the environmentalists and territorialists who are pushing for another development, valuing the Mapuche collective rights. There the PPD and/or the “soft center-right” would have had to leave their known practices and programs in order to generate a transformative political pact “denaturing the conflict.”
Unlike the previous cases, the independent candidate from Atacama, who came second in the first round, explicitly agreed with the actors of A aprueba Dignidad, including the incorporation of the environmental proposals of green regionalists. The same thing happened with the socialist of low vote in the first round of Los Rios, who surprisingly won by the explicit agreements of co-government with the Broad Front and collaboration on key issues with the brand-new mayor of Valdivia, Carla Amtmann.
Conclusion: the urgency of associating regions and empowering themselves collectively
In this picture of minorityization, the three governors and the thirteen governors have the historic task of creating a federation or association of regional governments, without personalizing and including regional councilors and the active association of officials of the GOREs that has defended the powers of the new elected authorities. It is a priority to have a law on regional rents and to support royalties such as the one promoted by Esteban Velásquez in mining, extending it to the forestry and fishing industry and raising the tiny aquaculture patent in the south.
This federation of regional governments, in alliance with the territorial universities, can advance in the request for basic grouped competences to be requested in March 2022 and those of each Region, remembering that the regional councils are the ones who legitimize them, in a model of tuition and horizontal thinking.
For the Constitutional Convention it remains the task of thinking how to avoid the “marasmo” of this second round with less than 20% participation, being advisable to convert the Regional Councils into Regional Assemblies whose candidates for governor (a) are the heads of lists that debate and according to the seats in that assembly, conform solid majorities based on programmatic commitments for the good of the territories, overcoming the shadows of the personalist caudillos that explain the backwardness and Latin American corruption. 
 
The content of this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of El Mostrador.

Original source in Spanish

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