By Daniel Brieba
Chile’s presidential runoff pits a Communist former labor minister against a hard-right former congressman, signaling both a sharp rightward turn and the eclipse of the old political elites. The social outburst of 2019 and compulsory voting are opening up opportunities for outsider candidates while reshaping who is viable on left and right, pushing Chile’s party system towards more radical alternatives.
Sunday’s first-round vote left Chile facing a stark choice between Jeannette Jara, the Communist former labor minister running as the Boric government’s continuity candidate, and José Antonio Kast, the hard-right leader who lost the 2021 runoff to Boric. Four years ago, Chile was absorbed by constitutional change and inequality; today, crime, irregular migration and economic stagnation dominate the public conversation.
Though Jara came first, the surprisingly narrow distance between them – about three percentage points – means that, barring a political earthquake, Kast will win the runoff comfortably. An initial poll gives him a 61–39 advantage, mirroring the margin by which voters in 2022 rejected the far-left draft constitution backed by Boric’s government. There is no other major left-wing candidate whose votes could plausibly transfer to Jara, while the three right-wing candidates together reached about 51% of the vote. Taken together, these results signal not only a shift to the right, but also a reconfiguration of which kind of right sets the tone in Chilean politics, mirroring changes that have already reshaped the left.
Taken together, these results signal not only a shift to the right, but also a reconfiguration of which kind of right sets the tone in Chilean politics, mirroring changes that have already reshaped the left.
Unlike the left, which held an official primary in July, the right failed to agree on a single candidate and went to the first round with three. The establishment figure was Evelyn Matthei, long the favorite before being overtaken by Kast. In earlier races he had played the right-wing populist; this time he stuck to a disciplined message on security, migration and jobs, steering clear of abortion and other cultural issues that cost him dearly four years ago. He admires Bukele’s prison policies and has praised Orbán’s border control policy, yet in this campaign he came across more as a hardline conservative than an outright nativist populist (though the line can be blurry). The role of radical firebrand fell to Johannes Kaiser, admirer of Argentina’s president Milei, who was happy to wage the culture war that Kast avoided. In this battle for the soul of the right, then, the hard edge won: Matthei finished a humiliating fifth, with about half of Kast’s vote and even fewer ballots than Kaiser, who had started the race as a fringe figure.
Matthei’s painful defeat is better understood as part of the demise of the old elites than as an ideological punishment for alleged moderation. Back in March, she and Carolina Tohá – Boric’s interior minister and a longtime figure of the moderate centre-left that governed Chile for most of 1990-2018 – seemed headed for a runoff against each other. Instead, Tohá was challenged in the primary and resoundingly defeated by Jara, a Communist not widely known before becoming a minister in this government. Now it was Matthei’s turn. In A People’s Tragedy, historian Orlando Figes recalls Trotsky, a few years into the Russian Revolution, saying that “the country had so radically vomited up the monarchy that it could not ever crawl down the people’s throat again”.
Chile’s 2019 social explosion seems to have done something similar to the country’s political establishment: though it failed as a constitution-making process, the outburst has made non-establishment figures indispensable on both left and right, because the old faces will not be swallowed again. The long-term political consequence of the 2019 uprising was a redefinition of political legitimacy: leaders are viable only insofar as they are not identified with the ancien régime.
The long-term political consequence of the 2019 uprising was a redefinition of political legitimacy: leaders are viable only insofar as they are not identified with the ancien régime.
Not coincidentally, the second surprise of the night was anti-establishment populist Franco Parisi garnering almost 20% of the vote, finishing third and just four percentage points behind Kast. Polls had him much lower, but his support – strongest in the north of the country and among the young – comes from an anti-political electorate likely to be under-represented in surveys. His ideological leaning might be called soft-right, but he refuses labels and bears some resemblance to Italy’s Five Star Movement in his technocratic air and ideological flexibility. Parisi’s surprising performance shows that there is a sizeable constituency for an anti-political posture untethered from traditional parties or clear ideological labels, even if it remains a minority.
Interestingly, Kast also performed better among voters obliged to turn out under the mandatory voting rules reinstated in 2022. According to one of the most accurate pollsters, Jara led Kast 34% to 16% among willing or “voluntary” voters, but trailed him 15% to 27% among “mandated” voters. Some analysts have read the rejection of the first far-left constitutional proposal as a consequence of shifting from voluntary voting in the constituent election (in April 2021) to mandatory voting in the ratification referendum (in September 2022). Taken together, these patterns suggest that voluntary and mandated voters differ markedly, with major consequences for electoral outcomes. The Chilean case therefore challenges both the claim, often made in defense of voluntary voting, that self-selected voters represent non-voters reasonably well and the familiar idea that compulsory voting tends to favor the left.
All in all, the results show that the social explosion’s aftershocks are still working themselves out politically. Faces associated with the centre-right and centre-left historical establishment carry a weight that will be difficult to shake off. Frustration with the status quo has pushed Chileans to the extremes (first on the left, now probably on the right); since 2010, alternation has been the name of the game. Chile’s party system remains organized around a left–right divide. Still, the balance of energy within each camp has shifted towards forces that present themselves as more uncompromising and less tied to the pre-2019 establishment.
Chile’s party system remains organized around a left–right divide, but the balance of energy within each camp has shifted towards forces that present themselves as more uncompromising and less tied to the pre-2019 establishment.
Indeed, party identification, long mired in the teens and down to 14% at the time of the social outburst, has climbed back to about 42%, much of it captured by newer parties on the far left and right. In Congress, both blocs are now split between newer, more radical forces and older, more moderate ones. This reconfiguration, with new actors gradually replacing the old, looks healthier than the party-system collapse feared when identification was at its nadir. But the fact that Jara and Kast, rather than Tohá and Matthei, are the two last candidates standing speaks volumes about where political momentum now lies.
Daniel Brieba is Assistant Professor in the School of Government, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Chile. He holds a DPhil in Politics from Nuffield College, University of Oxford.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
