By Carlos Meléndez
Chile is no longer structured by a single political divide rooted in the legacy of dictatorship. Instead, its electoral landscape is increasingly shaped by three forms of rejection: anti-Pinochet, anti-Communist, and anti-establishment identities. This trilemma helps explain why Chilean voters have repeatedly rejected both progressive and conservative constitutional projects—and why traditional binary frameworks no longer capture the country’s political dynamics.
Chile is no longer a nation torn neatly in two. It is a country divided into three “halves.” For decades, political scientists tracked its historical cleavage—the divide born in the 1988 plebiscite that ended Pinochet’s dictatorship—as if it were a geological fault line. That fracture shaped Chile’s party system for nearly three decades, crystallizing into two dominant coalitions: the center-left Concertación and the center-right Alianza. But cleavages erode. Today, Chile’s political space is structured less by programmatic ideologies than by three affective vetoes: anti-Pinochet, anti-Communist, and anti-establishment identities. These are structured rejections, defined more by what voters oppose than by what they support. If recent electoral outcomes appear erratic, it is not because voters are disoriented, but because the old compass no longer provides direction.
Tironi and Agüero famously described the “generative cleavage”—a split that not only polarized politics but reorganized it from the ground up. After 1988, Chile’s party system absorbed older tensions—Church versus State, workers versus elites, clericalism versus secularism—long identified by Valenzuela, Scully, and Somma. What had once been a tripartite landscape—left, center, right—was compressed into a binary. The Christian Democrats, long the custodians of the center, aligned with the anti-authoritarian bloc, and the political map folded into two camps. Democracy was restored, but through negotiation, effectively locking this cleavage into the party system. The dictatorship did not invent the divide; it merely reactivated it.
By 2025, electoral outcomes suggest not the resolution of old divides, but their mutation. David Altman has argued that a “new cleavage” now structures Chilean politics: those who supported the 2019 estallido social versus those who rejected it. Yet this “new” divide looks familiar—less a fresh fracture than a reconfigured tension. The cleavage persists, but it now strains under the weight of an emerging third force. What once appeared as a clear political division—rooted in regime legacies and reinforced by coalition structures—was never a deep sociological chasm. The binary is now buckling: what was once a two-sided map increasingly resembles a Venn diagram rather than a clean line.
Consider this tripartite structure. One circle contains the anti-Pinochet camp: progressives, reformists, and those who view the October 2019 uprising—a mass protest against inequality that triggered Chile’s constitution-making process—as a deferred democratic promise. Opposite them are the anti-Communists: heirs of the 1988 “Sí” vote, defenders of order, and critics of the Boric administration, deeply hostile to octubrismo. A third, increasingly visible circle is occupied by the anti-establishment sector: voters associated with the Partido de la Gente and the slogan ni fachos ni comunachos, who distrust all sides and consistently oppose establishment-backed proposals. This group emerged from the gradual erosion of the two coalitions that once structured the authoritarian–democratic divide. As those camps governed and disappointed, they created space not for synthesis, but for rejection.
These are not fluid identities in the usual, programmatic sense. Their stability derives less from ideology than from rejection. Chile’s political space is increasingly defined not by who voters support, but by who they oppose.
These are not visions of the future, but attachments to antagonism—what function less as ideological alignments than as affective vetoes. Most Chilean voters may struggle to name who represents them, but they know precisely who does not.
Chile’s political space is increasingly defined not by who voters support, but by who they oppose.
This helps explain why so many political scientists keep tripping over their own dichotomies. Argote and Visconti’s recent article insists that left and right remain the two prevailing ideological identities in Chile. But ideological persistence is not the same as identity. As their own data (and methodology) show, ideological self-placement can be remarkably stable, but that doesn’t mean it’s socially embedded as actual social identities. The fact that someone position herself “on the left” doesn’t necessarily imply that they feel part of a collective “left.” Nor does it prevent them from voting “En Contra” when the left is in government.
That paradox became visible twice. In 2022, Chile rejected a progressive constitutional draft; in 2023, it rejected a conservative counter-draft by an even wider margin. Did voters swing from left to right in a single year? Unlikely. A more plausible explanation is that roughly one-third of voters—the anti-establishment bloc—rejected both proposals, not out of incoherence, but out of consistency: opposition to anything resembling elite consensus.
A more plausible explanation is that roughly one-third of voters—the anti-establishment bloc—rejected both proposals, not out of incoherence, but out of consistency: opposition to anything resembling elite consensus.
The first round of the 2025 elections offered empirical visibility to this group. While Boric’s successor, Jeannette Jara, and Kast advanced to the runoff, the outsider candidate, Franco Parisi—riding the ni comunachos ni fachos slogan—captured nearly 20% of valid votes: not a fringe, but a third identity, defined by sheer negativity. And crucially, it was turbocharged by the return of compulsory voting, which reactivated disaffected citizens who might have stayed home. They are the electoral equivalent of a shrug—and a middle finger.
And this is where Chile’s political science orthodoxy runs out of map. The insistence on reading voter behavior through binary cleavages—left vs. right, authoritarian vs. democratic, progressives vs. conservatives—misses what’s actually shifting beneath the surface. A cleavage, by definition, splits the field in two. But what we’re seeing now is not a new cleavage. It’s a slow decomposition of the old one, as a third bloc—anti-establishment, anti-casta, anti-everything—emerges not between the poles, but outside their logic altogether. Analysts trained to see only formal coalitions will keep seeing two camps. But if they looked at negative identification—at who voters reject, not who they embrace—they’d see the three. And once you see them, it’s hard to unsee.
Juan Pablo Luna and others have long noted Chile’s crisis of representation, where voters exhibit stable attitudes but volatile allegiances. What remains underappreciated is how negative identity formation operates in such a context. The affective map of Chilean politics now looks something like this:
- Anti-Pinochetistas, who block any vestige of the dictatorship, real or symbolic.
- Anti-Comunistas, mobilized against the memory of Allende, the Frente Amplio, or taxes.
- Anti-Establishment, against both sides, with equal suspicion.
This is not political entropy, as in the Peruvian case, but a form of democratic deshielo. The once-frozen cleavage between dictatorship and democracy is melting—not into a uniform outcome, but into overlapping pockets of discontent that rarely converge into a shared direction. The map has changed: what was once a binary conflict now resembles a trilemma, with each pole resisting the others and no stable majority in sight.
“What was once a binary conflict now resembles a trilemma, with each pole resisting the others and no stable majority in sight.”
While second rounds and plebiscites may still force outcomes into binary frames, first rounds reveal a deeper truth: Chile is no longer a country divided in two, but one divided into three halves. And this trilemma—structured by affective vetoes—may not be uniquely Chilean; elsewhere, what appears as polarization may also conceal a third force of rejection hiding in plain sight.
Carlos Meléndez is a researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon and a research affiliate at CEU-Democracy Institute.
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.
