21 days from this Friday remain for President Sebastián Piñera to hand over the Government to Gabriel Boric. 21 days in which it is already possible to make balances of its management. One of these is the one carried out by the Barometer of Labor, by Fiel and the MORI study center, where it was revealed that only 15% of citizens rate his 4 presidential years as good.
This figure, however, is not the most revealing of the study that surveyed 1,000 people between February 5 and 16 of this year. The most relevant figure is in line with what some people have said on Twitter: that the President’s second presidential term is the “worst since the return to democracy.” And it is that according to the study, people were also consulted about their appreciation of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. The result? 22% rate it as good.
That is to say: the approval of Piñera’s second term is worse than the evaluation made of the Pinochet regime, something that according to the director of Latinobarómetro and founder of MORI Chile, Marta Lagos, “we had never had a percentage, like now, in which a president has less support than Pinochet, never, never in the 30 years that I have been doing opinion polls, none.
“I think it is an extremely relevant fact, because in addition to that, it is understood that after how many years the dictatorship ended, three decades, there is that number of people who still consider that even better than the current government,” he said in conversation with The counter.
This, according to Lagos, is due to a recent factor: the presidential campaign. “It has increased. Support for Pinochet had its worst moment in the past, but that support for good, that it was a good government has increased, it reached 16%. Then the presidential campaign also revived Pinochetism. It recovered it, it fed, made it concrete,” he explained.
“The presidential election took place with a dichotomy of chaos or me. But these data show that in reality the support that the image of Pinochet has is a very strong support, thirty-odd years after having left power. So it seems to me that this is a part of any political equation that is made in the future, we must consider this tremendous support that Pinochet has, which is not the five people from the upper neighborhood,” he added.
In fact, the call of the former presidential candidate of the Christian Social Front, José Antonio Kast, as a declared Pinochetist, influenced the Pinochet phenomenon “to be validated again.”
