Last weekend, the book “Nueva Mayoría y el Fantasma de la Concertación” (Ceibo Publishing House, 2014) was launched at the Santiago International Book Fair. On Monday, the book was presented by Alberto Mayol, its author and professor at Universidad de Santiago, on the University’s Radio Station (94.5 FM, 124 AM and www.radiousach.cl). 

In the Sin Pretexto radio program, Professor Mayol, who is also a regular panelist of this program, said that the volume of 430 pages is the result of the systematization of a set of information about the centre-left alliance that he has collected since 2009, during his research on the social processes that affected the country.

The book is an interpretation of the facts, but it also discloses data that may be new for the current political analysis, like “a study that Ricardo Camargo carried out in 2005, including interviews with many people of the Concertación pact with regards to the social movements at that time; or a section devoted to Enrique Correa; or the documents collected by professor Rodrigo Baño, who elaborated a monthly report between 1980 and 1990 about what was happening in Chile.” 

The first part of the book is devoted to the “Nueva Mayoría’s existential dilemma” and examines the political circumstances that gave rise to the centre-left pact; the second part aims to reflect on the “Concertación’s ethics”; and the third part is focused on social processes and on what the author recognizes as “the elite’s blindness.”

“The Concertación was a major political coalition, with a good framework, or in engineering words, with a capacity for resisting forces; however, it was never able to make structural changes because it failed every time it tried to,” Professor Mayol said to the Radio Station when he explained his research thesis. 

“Therefore, it seems to me that the idea that the Nueva Mayoría - a pragmatic agreement, much weaker than its predecessor- was going to be able to make the big structural changes that the former alliance was not, is a risky thesis about political management,” he said. “The Nueva Mayoría was born with the only purpose of supporting Michelle Bachelet’s leadership.” 

According to Mayol, the Concertación and its development in national politics did not end as they ought to, as “the most important political coalition of the Chilean history was destroyed and thrown into a mass grave, in an unknown date and without a definite headstone, giving rise to this new model that is a sort of Popular Front, but without people and composed of centre to left parties.” 

Translated by Marcela Contreras