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Original article: Negociando sin proyecto: La Oposición se pliega al paquete neoliberal de Kast-Quiroz a cambio de migajas

By Leopoldo Lavín Mujica

Last weekend, senators from the PS, PPD, and FA broke their silence and, in a gesture intended to signify «dialogue,» conditioned their support for José Antonio Kast’s neoliberal tax package on a handful of «fiscal compensations.»

The opposition lawmakers submitted a list of technical and political demands to the Executive, which includes taxes on tobacco, diesel, and online gambling, along with the elimination of the presumed income regime. The rationale is to «help rectify something that is wrong,» in the words of a socialist senator, but this maneuver ultimately reveals a strategic surrender: the opposition lacks an alternative program, only seeking to patch the far-right’s project.

What should be seen as a responsible act of opposition further underscores the lack of political will to construct a grassroots left-wing alternative.

Senators from the Democratic Socialism and the Broad Front are not presenting any substantial counterproposal that challenges the core neoliberal aspects of the reform—such as reducing the corporate tax from 27% to 23% and instituting a 25-year tax invariability for large companies while handing over natural resources to foreign capital.

Instead, they offer a catalog of «mitigations» that do not alter the concentration of wealth but merely seek to compensate for the «fiscal hole» they themselves diagnose. As noted by Senator PS Paulina Vodanovic, her concern is preventing cuts to healthcare, but they do not propose how to finance a rights-based system without relying on private investment.

The core of the negotiation is also revealing of its essence: they are requesting to postpone the vote to use the regional week to achieve a «transversal agreement» that provides political stability to the reform.

«Who will want to invest if they see that they won by a vote?» argues a legislator, revealing that their primary obsession is not social justice, but assurance for capital. This logic, which prioritizes country risk and investor perception over redistribution, has governed Chile since the transition, and the former Concertación has never managed to question it. It is the same dynamic that led to their defeat with Boric.

By asking the right (RN) to be a «contributor» to the agreement, the opposition legitimizes Kast’s project and relinquishes its role as a counterweight.

The technical diagnosis they present—the fiscal deficit that would extend for a decade, the uncertainty of private growth as the sole support for public spending—is understandable, but their proposal barely scratches the surface.

Rather than demanding a structural reform that taxes large fortunes, eliminations of exemptions on profits, and establishes a progressive wealth tax, they limit themselves to proposing a tax on tobacco or online gambling, as though the issue were cigarettes and digital platforms instead of the concentration of 80% of wealth in the richest 10%.

The Broad Front suggests freezing rents for five years but avoids addressing the heart of the real estate model that speculates on housing. The PS demands guarantees for waitlists but agrees that funding remains tied to the uncertain growth of an economy they themselves describe as risky.

A Weak Opposition Accepting Its Role as a Tail

What is at stake is not just the tax reform but the possibility of building a left-wing alternative to confront the extreme neoliberalism represented by Kast.

Former Concertación deputies and senators, who once were the axis of the transition, have opted for cabinet negotiation, trading small compensations instead of mobilizing citizens and contesting the narrative in the streets.

As Senator Gastón Saavedra warned, «the idea is to build a solid agreement,» but that agreement is not with the people, but with the Minister of Finance and the head of the cabinet, in strategic meetings that exclude social movements. For them, politics has been reduced to a technical table where diesel taxes are exchanged for votes in the Senate.

The consequence of this misguided strategy is the deepening of inequalities. By accepting the reduction of the corporate tax as the basis of discussion, the opposition validates that large companies pay less while the state finances itself with consumption taxes—on tobacco, diesel, and gambling—that hit poor sectors harder.

Wealth will continue to concentrate in the oligarchy and among high-net-worth individuals, not because alternatives do not exist, but because those who should propose them have chosen not to. The Kast government knows this and hence negotiates calmly, aware that it faces an opposition asking for crumbs rather than contesting power.

Minister Quiroz has not shown himself to be «particularly receptive» to changes in the employment tax credit or the invariability period, while it seems Minister Alvarado has been more open. This apparent internal division within the government is nothing more than a tactic to further fragment an already divided opposition.

Senators from the PPD, PS, and FA present their demands separately, without a common spokesperson or a unified program that articulates their requests. The image is one of a chorus of voices asking for different things while the government moves forward with its agenda.

The public observes this spectacle with skepticism. Polls indicate that trust in Congress remains at historical lows, and rightly so: while the country faces an extreme summer, a housing crisis, and a collapsed healthcare system, the opposition is preoccupied with negotiating taxes on online gambling.

There is no call for mobilization, no proposal for tax justice, no agenda for the nationalization of strategic resources. There is only management of scarcity within the same model that produces it. The former Concertación, trapped in its history of neoliberal moderation, has ceased to be opposition and instead become a technical support group for the government.

The cost of this renunciation will once again be borne by the popular sectors. The concentration of wealth will not be halted with taxes on tobacco, and inequality cannot be rectified by freezing rents without addressing housing speculation. What is needed is a left-wing project that confronts neoliberalism at its root, proposing a comprehensive tax reform that taxes large fortunes and profits, ending tax havens and financing a robust welfare state.

But that project is not on the negotiating table because those who should promote it have preferred the comfort of the Senate over the streets.

History will judge these legislators not by their intentions but by their actions. By opening themselves to support the neoliberal package in exchange for compensations, they have legitimized Kast’s project and sealed their own fate as an opposition that does not oppose.

Meanwhile, the oligarchy celebrates, high fortunes continue to accumulate, and the Chilean people bear witness once more to the confirmation that politics is a business for elites. The final question is whether they are still able to rectify, to build a real alternative that calls upon and mobilizes. But for now, the answer is a complicit silence, disguised as dialogue.

Leopoldo Lavín Mujica

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