The absence of a global discursive design and of a command unit that manages the communication strategies of the Government, is the general diagnosis made by a group of experts in political communication, when consulted by the discursive structure built in the current administration and that involves directly to Pablo Paredes, current director of the Ministry of Communications (Secom) and trusted man of President Gabriel Boric. In the opinion of the analysts, a successful communication strategy must necessarily be anchored to a solid political project, which must suppose a design that sees the society to which it wants to communicate as a whole.
Faced with the lack of a global design, communication strategies are transformed into tactics, which will work or not depending on each minister and their abilities. This is what Claudio Salinas, a journalist with a master’s degree in Political Communication and an academic from the University of Chile, believes. In this sense, he believes that “what must be wagered is to constitute a discourse, as a set of statements, that has coherence and consistency, especially in public appearance. This means that what is said and the action have equivalence. Something that since the current Government took office has been quite erratic, where loose messages are observed, one authority that opposes another, and what is finally perceived is the absence of a unity of command or a global design of communication strategies. ”.
A criticism that points directly to Paredes, who was in charge of Gabriel Boric’s presidential campaign in the second round, and who has faced several problems in his first stage heading the Secom, especially in the coordination of communications between the different ministries. At this point, according to Salinas, “a kind of permanent crisis appears in the government’s communication strategy, which reveals that deep down there is no strategy. Then, the strategic design is replaced by a set of practices that appear contradictory with each other, not only in words, but also in opposition to the authorities”.
The absence of a clear communication strategy places the scriptwriter close to the Democratic Revolution at the center of the questions. Errors such as those made by Minister Siches, the internal disagreements regarding the State of Exception, and the controversial statements by the Minister of Social Development, Jeanette Vega, regarding the existence of political prisoners in Chile, once again generate doubts regarding the real existence of a guideline or order about what is communicated and how it is communicated.
An obvious example of the above was the decree of a State of Constitutional Exception in the southern part of the country, which, for analysts, is nothing more than a synthesis of the communicational management of the Government in its first stage in La Moneda. After the proposal for an Intermediate State failed to even convince the official forces themselves, the State of Exception had to be resorted to, a measure that seeks to suspend the right to preserve it in a place that appears to be conflictive. A signal that appears from its origin as contradictory, because the previous statements made by the coalition headed by the President were related to withdrawing the militarization in the area. It is, then, a communicational contradiction that could, by the way, generate confusion.
In this regard, the journalist and academic from the Diego Portales University, Jorge Saavedra, believes that the Government -and in particular the unit led by Paredes- must work to avoid this contradictory logic, of permanent stumbling blocks and of authorities saying one thing one day and having to go back the next day. “Because while that is a quality that worked in Boric’s case in the campaign, in relation to apologizing for something you did, I think that apologizing continuously over time is no longer a reflection of a noble quality (that is, knowing how to recognize your mistakes) but it becomes the permanent repetition of mistakes, which, insofar as it is urgent and the old policy, is unforgivable, ”says Saavedra.
In this sense, it is the role of Paredes that should be more relevant, as the one who enables the strategies so that internal and external communication is sufficiently effective. Greater empowerment is still expected from someone who knows how politics works from a very young age, due to his closeness to the Broad Front and the student movement, and who assumed this responsibility after several years with ties to the creative area of presidential campaigns, first by Beatriz Sánchez and after Gabriel Boric. The leadership of Secom was a reward for his commitment to this last stage.
A communicational or political problem?
Regarding the technical role of interministerial coordination, experts agree that it is indeed the Secom that should assume said responsibility in a more active way, understanding that it is part of the tasks that said space has historically fulfilled. However, the academic and director of the Journalism Department of the Alberto Hurtado University, Ximena Orchard, considers that it is important to differentiate, in all cases, the communicational level from the political level, where the latter also denotes certain lack of coordination or carelessness that are not only communicational, but basically they also go through alignments of another type, but that have been noticed in the discursive plane, becoming a burden for the Government in this installation stage.
Orchard adds that “this is a very heavy burden and makes it more difficult for more successful agendas to begin to be installed, if deep down there is a permanent reaction to this type of error, where I think that, in some way, it is problematic and challenging for the Government to be able to reverse it, it is that to the extent that this weakness is repeated, a certain perception and public narrative is generated regarding that there is a sloppiness in that area. And the problem with that is that there is more attention to errors, and basically every element that can contribute to that narrative is going to be highlighted. So, it is very complex and challenging for the Government to distance itself from the place where it has been installed in these first few months.”
A “narrative of error” from which they seek to distance themselves in La Moneda and that will have a crucial stage in the coming months, in which the role played by the Minister of the Interior, Izkia Siches, will be decisive in her intention to redeploy publicly in a more autonomous way, which is relevant not only from the perspective of the success of his own ministry, but also to achieve a role of political alignment within the cabinet.
Finally, the exit plebiscite on September 4 could be a lifesaver for a government that has faced a complex scenario in its first months in office. Analysts agree that the success of the I Approve option in the constituent election could positively contaminate the administration of President Boric, understanding that there is an obvious closeness, and that what is at stake is a political dispute located in a binary option where, definitely, it falls on one side or the other. On the contrary, if the Rejection is imposed, the political situation of the Executive could become even more complex.
