The next president of Chile, who will govern the South American country between 2026 and 2030, will be defined between the left-wing candidate, the communist Jeannette Jara, and the far-right José Antonio Kast, leader of the Republican Party. This is what voters decided this Sunday, after the first round of the elections. With 62% counted, Jara, standard-bearer of President Gabriel Boric’s ruling party, reached 26.63%, below what the polls had predicted. Second place was obtained by Kast, with 24.25% of the votes, a minimum distance and which leaves him favorite to win, to the extent that the conservative forces have obtained majority support. Third, the surprise of the day: the right-wing populist Franco Parisi reached 19.05% in his third attempt to reach La Moneda, displacing both the radical libertarian Johannes Kaiser, who obtained 13.94% of the vote, placing fourth, and the big loser: the traditional right Evelyn Matthei, who ranked fifth (13.204%), giving the Chile Vamos coalition a major failure.
“I congratulate Jeannette Jara and José Antonio Kast for their passage to the second round,” said President Boric della Moneda, supported by his Interior Minister, Álvaro Elizalde, and his spokeswoman, Camila Vallejo.
The results, in which the union of right-wing forces has a notable majority, coincide with the scenario repeatedly shown by the polls: on December 14, the almost 15.7 million voters compulsorily called to the polls will have to choose Boric’s successor between two extremes of politics. Although Jara won first place, Kast, Kaiser and Matthei’s votes amounted to 51%, making Kast strong for the second round. If we add the support of Parisi, a populist opponent of Boric, we reach 70%, even if Parisi’s vote is difficult to decipher, because there is no evidence that it can be transferred to the right.
The difference between Jara and Kast, around the two points, was not what the left expected. Polls show consecutively that the 51-year-old public administrator would get the greatest support this Sunday the 16th, but with a difference of between five and nine points with Kast. His main challenge was not to win this first round – the ruling party organized itself around Jara’s single candidacy, after the primaries – but to reach a majority that would allow him to win in the second round or run-off, on 14 December. According to polls, which have generally provided correct predictions, Jara would lose to Kast, a 59-year-old lawyer. Especially with such a minimal difference compared to the Republican. From this Sunday evening, therefore, he will have to send strong signals to the moderate electorate, as he did this evening when evaluating the proposals of other candidates, such as those of Parisi or Matthei. An expected first gesture is for Jara to suspend or freeze her membership in the Communist Party, where she has been a member since she was 14, which generates great resistance. Furthermore, a change is expected in his team and the inclusion of figures who will allow him to provide certainty to the political centre.
Kast, it seems, surpassed both Parisi, Matthei and Kaiser. It is the third time that the far-right candidate is running for president. In the previous elections, in 2021, he had won the first round, but in the run-off he lost to Boric, the current president. Ultra-conservative on individual freedoms, such as abortion, Kast has promised to emergency government for Chile the priorities are security, economic growth, the weakening of the state – it is proposed to cut 6 billion dollars in 18 months – and irregular immigration. Tonight he will probably have the support of Kaiser, with whom they already have a joint electoral pact for Congress. Kast will be joined by much of the world of the traditional right, grouped in the Chile Vamos coalition. Pragmatic right-wingers are expected to join forces to prevent Jara from coming to power on March 11, when Boric leaves government at the age of 40.
The signals that the two candidates in the run-off will send in the next few hours are fundamental for gathering consensus. Jara has even fallen below the historical support that the Boric government had, 30% of loyalists, but insufficient to be the majority. In this first electoral campaign, in fact, she had to distance herself from the president and his administration, despite being Minister of Labor herself until a few months ago. Jara’s mission is titanic, because today in Chile the wind blows in favor of the radical right and, as has happened for twenty years, presidential elections are always won by the opposition bloc.
Chile once again celebrated, as happened after the restoration of democracy, an absolutely normal electoral event. In addition to electing Boric’s successor, the voters renewed the entire Chamber of Deputies (155 deputies) and practically half of the Senate (23 of the 50 senators from seven regions, which does not include the capital constituency). It is the first time since the return of democracy in 1990 that citizens have elected a President of the Republic with compulsory voting and, at the same time, with automatic registration in the census.
Chilean society has been pendulum in its electoral preferences. After the social outbreak of 2019, with unusual waves of violence that left the government of moderate right-wing president Sebastián Piñera on the ropes, voters approved a constitutional path to replace Augusto Pinochet’s 1980 Constitution, which however bears the signature of socialist president Ricardo Lagos for the reforms introduced in 2005. Then they elected an editorial body dominated by the far left and, when President Boric’s government barely had six months, they rejected the text supported by the ruling party with a percentage of 62% against 38%. It was a resounding failure that forced the government to adapt to new circumstances and to moderate the high expectations with which it took office in March 2022. Subsequently, a second process was opened to prepare a new Constitution, where the drafters, especially from the far right of the Republican Party, triumphed, but in 2023 Chileans again rejected the proposal with a percentage of 55% to 42%.
This is what it is known as Chilean pendulum. They seem like contradictory decisions, but they are not: society remains angry and, above all, with great disaffection towards political institutions. Therefore, for two decades, they have been punishing the rulers and favoring the opposition, as if they were trying to believe in change, which never really comes. Governments, in turn, with an atomized Congress, have serious problems in reaching a majority and carrying forward legislative programs. Chileans, who have no faith in governments, parties and parliament, participate disillusioned in the elections which, for the first time, include compulsory voting. Polls show that Chileans are more worried than confident about these elections and that more than half agree with this sentence “No matter who governs, I still have to go to work.”
This is the Chile that will receive its next president in four months, when he takes office on March 11. With an unfaithful electorate, which does not maintain consensus for long, and which is above all frightened by the arrival of transnational organized crime. It’s part of the social landscape that explains why the air pushes extreme speeches like Kast’s and, as a result, the left’s difficulties.
