Without Agonism There Is no Paradise. Populism and Polarization in the Chilean Constituent Process

Abstract

The Chilean constituent process has been interpreted as the institutional and democratic channelling of the protests that shook the country in October 2019. Although its causes are still debated, this article assumes that it contested the role of the political and economic establishment, as well as a vindication of marginalized and oppressed groups. From these features, the estallido social has been labelled as populist, and some of these features have been inherited by the constituent process. One of these features is the criticism against a consensual understanding of politics, representative of the liberal deliberative tradition, which is accused of neutralizing the political conflict, while disguising hegemony as technocratic rationality. This article proposes that, against the consensual understanding, the current constituent process tends towards an agonistic understanding of politics, for which the nature of politics is essentially adversarial, while the legitimacy of the new constitution is the outcome of a democratic dispute for power. The conditions of polarization that are usually denounced as problematic to reach agreements in the political centre, seem to be, in this case, instrumental to this agonistic understanding, to the extent that they make transparent the breadth of the ideological spectrum whilst make visible social actors who are usually excluded from decision-making. Insofar the constituent process is ongoing, it is too soon to assert whether this combination of populism and polarization reinvigorates democracy in Chile, or otherwise its excessive centrifugal force risks political instability.