The anti-system vote will also be present. It has been a campaign where the right-wing vote will gain visibility, but let’s not fool ourselves: the anti-system vote had never lost prominence. The anti-establishment vote did not disappear, but has waited in hiding to burst forth with a roar at the end and scare the establishment. Again. It is a vote without any charm with anyone in particular, and with resentment for many in particular; He has no affiliation, he is from the left, center and right, but he always prefers to jump into the void rather than eat dishes from the hegemonic political offering. It may not lead the polls, but it is always available to anyone who wants to consume it. And, in the final stretch, he is once again the protagonist.
It transforms with each election. Change your vehicle, your tone, maybe a little geography. This time he did it through very different figures: Belmont, Álvarez and Sánchez. They do not represent the same thing, but they say, from different places, that the citizen sees the abyss and is willing to throw himself over it.
Belmont was the first ‘outsider’, but he is also a retired ‘insider’ who, established on his loyal Spartan bases, has been developing a political capital of breaking with the establishment for many years. It does not represent the conventional break, but the break with the conventional way of doing politics; His way of building militancy was to walk outside the institutional channels, in a direct, affective way. There is nothing new in Belmont as a character, only the constant appearance of the myth of the eternal return about the caudillo messiah who promises salvation from the oppressive system.
Álvarez built his career ridiculing politicians. Today compete with them. It’s not just ironic that I aspire to retire them. In the middle of a campaign where the citizen was so disconnected, someone who makes us laugh is preferable because there are already many to make us cry. Sánchez introduces a third variant, less visible in Lima, but decisive in the rural and poorest world of our regions: symbolic representation. Castillo’s capital allowed him to grow because there are many people whose vote was despised by the establishment and who decided to join to vindicate their conviction. His vote is a protest against the distance and the ignoring of an establishment that decided to ignore him.
Thus, there is one who distrusts from within, but takes refuge in figures who were always on the margins; There is another who punishes from the outside, looking for someone who has never been in politics and entertains; and another that is organized from the territory. That is why the mistake would be to think that the anti-system vote is an accident of the process. It is a structural part. It appears when the election stops being a dispute over projects and becomes an administration of rejections and antipathies.
*El Comercio opens its pages to the exchange of ideas and reflections. In this plural framework, the Diario does not necessarily agree with the opinions of the columnists who sign them, although it always respects them.
