translated from Spanish: White smoke on the center-left: Constituent Unity parties agree to hold citizen primary and do not rule out digital voting

It was an open secret, but finally this Friday, after several disagreements in the Coalition of Constituent Unity, Yasna Provoste confirmed from Vallenar that she will be the presidential candidate of the Christian Democracy (DC), and that she is available to submit “to any mechanism that is open, democratic and participatory”.
The announcement has generated reactions in the political spheres of opposition and ruling party, and put the ball in the court of the Constituent Unity parties. In fact, after celebrating Provoste’s willingness to submit to an eventual conventional primary to define the center-left standard-bearer who will be on the ballot in the first round, the leaders of the bloc’s communities held a first meeting at the home of DC President Carmen Frei to take the first steps to clear the mechanism.
And white smoke quickly came out. After the meeting, the president of the PPD, Heraldo Muñoz, left to communicate that there is already agreement to carry out “primaries or citizen consultation”, in a format -face-to-face or electronic- to be defined, as well as the date of the same.
“There is a decision to hold a citizen consultation or a citizen primary to choose the candidate or the unitary presidential candidate from our center-left sector. The modality, whether face-to-face or digital, will be decided in the coming hours,” he said, anticipating that there will be more meetings this weekend.
Munoz explained that in this consultation “the militants of all our parties, in addition to the independents, will be able to participate.”
This agreement also includes a common program and a unitary parliamentary list, two other key elements of the center-left negotiation, which includes Constituent Unity, the Liberal Party and the New Deal.
“At the same time we have decided to draw up a joint program, with structural changes, with a new development model and a common parliamentary list,” he said.
Munoz commented that those who will participate in this consultation will be Paula Narvaez (PS), Carlos Maldonado (PR) and Yasna Provoste (DC). “We don’t know if there will be any other candidate”, he said. Regarding the possibility that Marco Enriquez-Ominami will join the PRO, he maintained that “it depends on him and his party”.
Finally, the PPD helmsman reported that before the citizen consultation, debates will be organized: “It would be completely fundamental, the media would be very interested in having debates so that the ideas that each of the candidates have are exposed to the citizenry in the same way as happened for the legal primaries”.
At the end of the meeting, the president of the Socialist Party (PS), Álvaro Elizalde, said that “ the important thing is to have a common candidacy decided by the citizens in a democratic way”.
Location to the DC
The understanding came after the summonses to the DC from the ranks of the socialist party (PS) militant Paula Narvaez. The candidate of the PS-PPD-PL and New Deal, who this week lived the most difficult days of her campaign between the indefinities of her own party and the departures of some PPD parliamentarians, asked Provoste directly that “ she can ask her party to make that definition in the coming hours, and thus begin this new stage, to face a citizen primary that allows us to have a candidate in November”.
“Citizens demand to participate in these processes today. We cannot go any further into the mistakes, the mistakes must be corrected. That means today, all going to a participatory mechanism that in that case are citizen primaries,” he insisted.
“Every hour that passes, it’s an hour less than we have to make these definitions. We have very limited times,” he remarked. Thus, he put pressure on the DC by pointing out that “the Christian Democratic candidate has said that she is open to a participatory process, therefore, today her party has to decide”, especially taking into account that the other parties of the pact “are for a citizen primary and have expressly said it”.
For his part, the president of the Radical Party (PR), Carlos Maldonado, had celebrated the “ willingness that Yasna Provoste has expressed to submit to a democratic mechanism to define the candidacy of the center-left, but that mechanism has a name, it has a form: conventional primary with electronic voting, and that agreement has to be taken today, because there is no more time”.
More skeptical was Marco Enriquez-Ominami, who in the run-up to provoste’s launch stated the intention of his collection.the ivity of competing in the presidential elections. According to the former deputy, the announcement of Provoste “came with fine print, I have the suspicion that the presidents of parties are going to smoke the electronic primary”. In his opinion, “what he is waiting for (Provoste) is to buy time to get Paula Narváez and Carlos Maldonado out.#8221”
Wave of reactions
The left and right of The Constituent Unity were not indifferent with provoste’s announcement from Vallenar. For the deputy of Unir, Marcelo Díaz, “it is now up to the citizens to define between proposals for continuity, correction to the model or profound transformations such as those represented by the candidate of A aprueba Dignidad” Gabriel Boric.
For her part, deputy RD Catalina Pérez said that “ hopefully there is the time and spaces to know their proposals that I believe, considering the party she represents, will continue to be only adjustments to the current model and not the proposal for real change that Chile needs”.
From the ruling party there was criticism of Provoste’s announcement. Senator Ivan Moreira (UDI) accused that “she is more of the same, from a more leftist left. It’s the same left, and much more, than Boric’s. Therefore, Yasna Provoste represents neither the center nor the center-left. Even more, it represents the criminals and violentists of the social explosion, those who want to nationalize pension funds”.
The senator also considered that Provoste should resign from the presidency of the Senate. We can’t have it in a double standard, because it’s clearly going to affect coexistence and there’s going to be a lot of polarization in the Senate”.
Along these lines, he maintained that “the person who gives guarantees is Vice President Senator Jorge Pizarro, so I want to point out that the presidential candidacy of Yasna Provoste is more of the same”.