Mirage

We all know the story. A traveler, lost in the desert, tormented by thirst, desperate under the sun's whip beating down vertically upon him, suddenly spots it. It is an oasis, with vegetation, a lagoon and even palm trees. Water and shade. But beware: is it really the miraculous relief he needs, or is it just a mirage, a product of the optical illusion fed by his own desperation? Progressivism has already been enduring several years of painful wandering through the desert. Since the collapse of the constituent process, it has gone from one beating to another. Time and again, Chileans have made it clear that the left is a minority and that it lost the trust they once placed in it to build a better country. If the national outlook is desperate, the international one is terminal. Social democracy is shrinking, while the far right roams the Western world, winning one slot after another, from Colombia to France, and from Bolivia to —Germany, of all places! It is scorched earth. And the last two remaining reference points (Lula and Sánchez) seem on the verge of falling in the electoral battles of the coming weeks in Brazil and Spain. Then, on the horizon, the oasis appears. A beloved former president returns to Chile, freed, after her failure at the UN, to put on her gloves and step into the local political ring to throw punches. For the first time this year, the progressive parties agree on something: they organize a tribute event, it fills up with an atmosphere of fervor and, to carry hope to its paroxysm, the former president flirts with the idea of being, perhaps, just maybe, a candidate for La Moneda in 2030. Hope. Euphoria. Bachelet is back, the right trembles, Kast's legs are shaking. On the horizon finally appears the oasis of water and shade that a political sector at the limit of its strength had longed for so much. But beware: is it really the miraculous relief it needs, or is it just a mirage, a product of the optical illusion fed by its own desperation? I believe it is the latter. Returning to the place where one was once happy is always the most comfortable form of self-deception. Bachelet symbolizes that: an era in which the left was capable of embodying the common sense of a country that had liberalized, in which new winds were blowing on issues such as gender equality and individual liberties. Also, an era in which the neoliberal consensus was cracking, and demands for a substantial role of the State in correcting the market and attacking social inequalities were appearing everywhere. Bachelet led those battles, won two presidential elections and gave the center-left eight years in power. But that Chile no longer exists. Today, after a long succession of crises, we have a country on edge in the midst of a convulsed world. In the last decade, the left handed over to the right, through negligence and arrogance, the fundamental issues in the minds of Chileans, such as the fight against crime, migration order, economic growth and employment. To be an option, progressivism has to start by becoming credible again on those matters. And today it has a unique window of opportunity, considering the monumental failure of the current government in its supposedly strong areas, which today leave Chile with a million unemployed, the economy in technical recession, a pusillanimous foreign policy in the face of threats against our sovereignty, a chaotic security policy, and questionable social cuts. Efforts are underway: former ministers, mayors and mayoresses are speaking frankly about security, employment and the cost of living. They are gropingly seeking to articulate a credible discourse on the issues of the present and the future. The president and his ministers avoid by every means answering for their own management and their unfulfilled promises. Kast spent his first six months blaming Boric for all the ills. That discourse has run out. Now he tries to repeat the trick by attempting to blame Bachelet's reforms for all the ills, and thus divert the conversation. No, Kast's legs are not "shaking," as the secretary general of the PS said, at Bachelet's appearance. Rather, he is clinging to her like a shipwrecked man to a plank, trusting that this confrontation with the past will save him from having to explain the disaster of the present. It is a discourse that directs his increasingly impatient troops against a common adversary and, above all, buys time by changing the subject. Anything, so long as he does not take responsibility for the current reality. Unemployment? Recession? Insecurity? Better to talk about Bachelet and how her reforms brought us here. Michelle Bachelet has an earned place in the history of Chile, and she has, of course, every right to participate in the public debate and play a relevant role in the opposition. But her emergence risks distracting progressivism from its urgent task: to consolidate an option of the future, not of the past, both in its leaders and in its approach to the issues. Nostalgia warms the body, but it is not a weapon for contesting power in the real world. The paralyzing effect of Bachelet, moreover, progressivism already knows. Between 2010 and 2013 it froze, waiting for the former president to arrive from New York to save it. The result was that it returned to power, but without ever having done the analysis, the renewal and the self-criticism for the end of the Concertación. They took the easy shortcut, and the result is that a solid alliance of the center and the left has never been able to reestablish itself since. Then, the former Concertación froze again in 2024 and the summer of 2025, overinterpreting every ambiguous response from the former president as a hope that she would be a candidate. When she finally said no, the damage to Carolina Tohá's candidacy was already irreversible; Tohá started late and with a gigantic "Plan B" sign on her shoulders. Now, a desperate progressivism commits the same mistake again. It confuses nostalgia with the future, gets excited about recreating a past that will not return, and convinces itself that perhaps it can take the easy shortcut of hanging on to the former president instead of traveling the arduous and stony road of self-criticism and reconstruction. Thirsty, exhausted and at the limit of its strength, progressivism tries to take refuge in an oasis that is nothing more than a mirage.