Of the eight candidates for the presidency of Chile who will be on the ballot this Sunday, Evelyn Matthei (Santiago de Chile, 72 years old) has the longest public career. Since she entered politics in 1988, the historic right-wing economist has been a deputy, senator, labor minister in the first government of Sebastián Piñera, presidential candidate by chance in 2013 – she lost to Michelle Bachelet, socialist – and mayor of Providencia, a wealthy municipality in Santiago de Chile. Scholar, worker, with a well-known strong, impulsive, distrustful character, descendant of Lutheran Germans – even if the maternal grandmother of the Countries Baschi, a Catholic, had an enormous influence – all of Chile has known Matthei for four decades. He began this campaign as the favourite, but the two far-right candidates, the republican José Antonio Kast and the libertarian Johannes Kaiser, have left his world perplexed, which is struggling between adhering to radical forces or, instead, defending the existence of a modern right detached from the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, a more difficult and longer path. Matthei herself, daughter of a member of the regime’s military junta, has failed to illuminate her own path and in this campaign has been seen as confused: at times as harsh as Kast and Kaiser, unpredictable compared to Pinochet’s 17 years and, only at times, as the leader who can give certainty to Chile in a moment of uncertainty where citizens ask, above all, for a safe country.
Daughter of Fernando Matthei, general of the Chilean Air Force (FACh), now deceased, who spent his entire military career, from below, so he was engaged in several missions both in Chile and abroad in the middle of the last century. In the 1950s Matthei was assigned to an air base in northern Chile, Antofagasta, where he became close friends with a man in uniform named Alberto Bachelet. Their daughters, Evelyn and Michelle, were two years apart, so they were never friends, but the girls who were not yet 10 lived in the same houses in Cerro Moreno, in the middle of the desert, and attended the same school. They have a common matrix, life among the FACh officers, even if the future of Chile, the 1973 coup d’état and the biography of their own parents – Bachelet died tortured by his commitment to the government of Salvador Allende and Matthei was part of the government and military junta of Pinochet – have separated the families. The lives of both women are, in some ways, a portrait of the rupture Chile experienced 52 years ago.
The candidate Matthei completed her secondary studies at the German School – the German influence marks her biography -, she studied piano since she was a child, after leaving school she specialized in the instrument in London and then returned to Chile, in the early years of the Pinochet dictatorship, to study economics at the Catholic University, where she graduated with honors although she did not graduate in commercial engineering. She wanted to return to the UK, however, she met a professor at her university, Jorge Desormeaux, three years older, whom she married in 1979 and with whom she had three children, who today value their privacy. Her husband, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease, is an eminent and well-known economist who became vice-president of the Central Bank. Both constitute one of the most stable couples in Chilean politics, even if he did not have a leading role in this presidential campaign, given his delicate health conditions, as Desormeaux himself revealed in an interview. “We went through hard times,” he confessed on public television. “The feeling that things are not going well is starting to spread among us”, added the candidate, known for her great capacity for work and energy, despite her age.
His political life is linked to Sebastián Piñera, who was twice president of Chile and died in a helicopter crash in early 2024. He was his professor at the Catholic University, then his employer, his friend. Along with another prominent right-wing leader, Andrés Allamand, the current Ibero-American secretary general, Piñera recruited her to join a liberal faction of the right-wing National Renewal party, RN, months after the 1988 plebiscite that defined the dictator’s fate. Matthei campaigned for Yes to Pinochet, then supported the right-wing presidential candidate, Hernán Büchi, and, although she lost both battles, she was elected RN deputy in the first parliament of democracy in 1990. She was one of the few women who made up the Congress and the only one to be part of the Finance commission, composed only of men.
It is part of Matthei’s curiosities: it has been advanced and opened paths for women in the right and in the economy, traditionally male spaces. He supported the first democracy reforms from Parliament. Despite having supported the Pinochet regime in the plebiscite – she is familiarly linked to the dictatorship and this places her in constant contradiction – she was part of a youth patrol who with Allamand and Piñera tried to modernize the right and democratize it. That project, due to a case of telephone espionage in which Matthei lied to the entire country, ultimately fell through. She left the RN, ended up joining the UDI, a doctrinaire party that had little to do with her, but she maintained her path: she won the elections and was the spearhead of a right capable of supporting individual freedoms such as divorce, which in the 1990s was not allowed in Chile. But the gringaas they call him, perhaps due to the ideological frivolity of which he is accused, in this presidential campaign – for which he has prepared his entire political life – he was unable to emerge as a different alternative to Kast and Kaiser and, in the end, he ended up confusing himself with them. There was an attempt: when he accused Kast of a “disgusting campaign” against him encouraged by robot AND troll on social networks with the message that he was mentally incapable of occupying the presidency. But economic law, from which Piñera fled because he is a millionaire himself, prevented Matthei from presenting his complaint in court. Business leaders argue that pushing the right at a key moment when it has the best chance of regaining power was a huge mistake.
There is a possibility that she will go to the second round with Jara, if the voter moderates and turns his back on the far right. But that’s not the most likely thing. In that case, many are wondering whether Matthei – who has demonstrated that he has many lives – will retire from politics or not. It seems difficult to imagine her having a peaceful life.
