Presidential elections will be held in Chile this Sunday, along with parliamentary elections, and in the shadow of Chilean pendulum ignore the results. It has been 20 years, in 2006, since a president handed over power to a successor of the same political affiliation. It was with Ricardo Lagos, a socialist, who passed the presidential sash to Michelle Bachelet, also a socialist, who had been his minister of Health and Defense. Since then, left and right have alternately governed Chile, as if voters – angry and distrustful – punished incumbent presidents and always opted for change. In these elections, therefore, everything seems to indicate that the wind is blowing in favor of the right, but not of anyone: the ultras of José Antonio Kast, who is running as the favorite for the 2026-2030 presidency.
It is not an expected fate: the government of Gabriel Boric, progressive, led by a new, young generation of the left, has failed to bring together large majorities and has maintained a firm, but static, 30% of support which is not needed to win elections. Expectations were endless at the beginning of the Administration, a boomerang. It, in turn, has a high rejection rate, 62% according to the latest survey by the Center for Public Studies (CEP).
If we were to analyze the last six-year period in Chile, from 2019 to today, citizens’ political decisions would apparently not be coherent. At the start of a right-wing government, the second of Sebastián Piñera (2018-2022), elected with 57% of the vote, the social unrest crystallized in the epidemic that began on October 18, 2019 caused the president’s approval to collapse by 4.6% that month and, two years later, Piñera handed over command to Boric.
Two failed attempts at a Constitution
The social explosion, in which massive marches took place demanding better pensions, education and healthcare, caused massive political effervescence and an unusual wave of violence. On November 15, 2019, the entire Chilean political class, with the exception of the Communist Party (PC), signed the Agreement for peace and the new Constitutionwhich sought a political solution to the crisis: it was signed the day after a day of extreme violence in the streets. The name of the then deputy Boric also appeared in that document.
The agreement allowed Chileans, during the pandemic, to go to the polls on 25 October 2020, to vote in a first plebiscite to decide whether or not to replace the 1980 Constitution, created during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet: 78% are in favor of a new Fundamental Charter and 78% agree that the drafting falls on a Constitutional Convention, made up of 155 citizens – with 17 seats reserved for indigenous peoples – who would stand for election to write it.
Those elections took place on May 17, 2021, and in the midst of this effervescence of the social epidemic, the majority of left-wing independents (68%), including The People’s List, were elected. The wind was blowing in favor of the left and that year Boric won not only the primaries of the July bloc I approve Dignity against the communist Daniel Jadue. In November he went to the second round with Kast, who was riding for La Moneda for the second time. In December he was elected President of the Republic with 55% of the votes.
With the Constitutional Convention underway, the young Boric government gambled much of the implementation of its reforms by betting that Chile would approve the new Constitution. But the process turned out to be a fiasco, tinged with extreme and identity-based proposals. On September 4, 2022, when the Broad Front administration had been in office for six months, in an exit plebiscite, 62% of Chileans categorically rejected the left’s proposal and 38% approved it. It was the first with compulsory voting and automatic registration in the registry.
The disappointment was greater. But even so, with the agreement of the traditional right, another constitutional process was made possible. In a new election on May 7, 2023, the Chilean pendulum We went from a congress with a left-wing majority to the election of a Constitutional Council of 55 members in which the Republican Party, founded by Kast, obtained 35% of the votes, the majority. And, together with the traditional right-wing bloc, which obtained 21%, the opposition took control of the drafting of the Constitution. Boric’s ruling party, with 28%, lost its veto power.
But the right-wing constitutional proposal, with strong conservative overtones promoted by the Republicans, was rejected by 55% at the polls in 2023.
Thus, Chile broke a record, rejecting two constitutional proposals in 15 months, one from the left and the other from the right, to remain with the same Law of Laws, born with Pinochet, but reformed 70 times and signed by the socialist Ricardo Lagos since 2005.
The faithless electors
Chile is preparing for an election in which the ghost of political pendulum come back again. The polls give first place to the candidate of the left bloc and communist militant, Jeannette Jara, Boric’s former minister. But according to most polls he would go to a run-off with Kast, who would beat him in the second round. Furthermore, after the Republican, a standard-bearer has emerged further to his right: the libertarian Johannes Kaiser, who could reach third place.
For Daniel Mansuy, a Chilean academic and intellectual, if after the elections Boric’s left becomes the opposition, “he will have to think about what had to happen in his government, how many expectations he will have frustrated, so that his great legacy is that 40 points will be added between Kast and Kaiser, or at least 35. The government and the Frente Amplio will have a certain responsibility in this phenomenon, and it is something they cannot ignore”, he said in an interview with EL PAÍS.
These elections also have a key advantage, compulsory voting, which has been reinstated in 2022 for constitutional trials. This implies that, while the last leaders were elected in elections in which around eight million voters participated, this time 15.7 million will have to vote. His behavior is uncertain, even if the local elections of October 2024 shed light: in the councillors, where political forces are measured, the opposition went from 746 to 1,068, or 47% of the national total.
Kathya Araujo, a doctor of American studies and social researcher, observed that “compulsory voting hides the disconnect that exists with politics.” And it seems that “everyone is interested in the elections”, but it is “a mirage”. The academic from the University of Santiago said this The second that in his studies there are many people who have told him that they come from socialist families, but that “they would gladly vote for Kaiser, Kast or Parisi. Or they mention someone from the center simply because they like him. Much of society has little ideological support. They are faithless voters.”
Jara also referred to this disaffection. And he said it on Friday at The Mercury of Valparaíso that today “people involved in politics, of all sectors, must do self-criticism. The main challenge, in my opinion, is not whether the pendulum is on one side or the other, but the large number of people disaffected by politics. And this is serious in a society that seeks social cohesion and progress”.
