Chile falls into the category of Defective Democracy

In January of this year, the Democracy Index of the Intelligence Unit of the British magazine The Economist was released, which provides a snapshot of the state of democracy in 165 independent states and two territories. This covers almost the entire world's population and the vast majority of the world's states (microstates are excluded). Rated on a scale of 0 to 10.

The Democracy Index is based on five categories:

• Electoral process and pluralism
• government functioning,
• Political participation,
• Political culture
• Civil liberties.

Based on their scores on a range of indicators within these categories, each country is classified as one of four regime types: “full
democracy”, “defective democracy”, “hybrid regime” or “authoritarian regime”.

In the case of Chile, it achieved 7.98 points, remaining in the 25th place worldwide, which means a drops six places compared to the results of 2022.

The study by the English publication showed that almost half of the world's population lives in some type of democracy (45.4%), but only 7.8% resides in a “full democracy”, while more than a third of the world's citizens live under authoritarian governments, that is, 39.4%. 

In the case of Latin America, Uruguay and Costa Rica are considered full democracies.

The question that must be asked is how we arrived at this unfortunate situation as a Chilean society, where we lost our way to the point of having neglected democracy and its quality that distinguished it from what could be found in the neighborhood and now has us as a country with democracy. defective.

There are many statements that respond to this, such as the levels of crime and murders such as hitmen that are part of our reality, the enormous number of cases of corruption within public services such as the "audios" case starring lawyer Luis Hermosilla and involving the Internal Revenue Service and the Investigative Police, the noisy case of left-wing foundations, the most emblematic of which is Democracia Viva with misuse of public money, ministers who carried out fraud on the Chilean State such as Giorgio Jackson who At this time he is leaving his responsibility and settling in Spain.

We can always organize to exercise surveillance of our democracy, and prevent levels of corruption from continuing to escalate that are difficult to stop. The underlying issue is to be able to sustain and protect the institutions that have taken us so much effort and years to rebuild, something that should be of utmost importance for Chileans.