For three decades since the end of Pinochet’s bloodthirsty dictatorship, Chile has not experienced major social unrest and the two systemic coalitions, the center-left Concertasi and the center-right Chile Vamos, are shifting smoothly.But this image is now a thing of the past after the general elections held on November 21, 2021, for both the Presidency, the Parliament and the Senate respectively.
The candidates of the two systemic parties collapsed in the first round of the presidential contest, with percentages of 12% and were excluded from the second round and decisive round of December 19, when they will claim power from two outsiders from opposite ends of the political spectrum: far-right Antonio Cast and radical left-winger Gabriel Boric, who secured 28% and 26% of the vote respectively.
The son of a Wehrmacht officer who fled, along with other Nazis, to Chile, a follower of Trump and Bolsonaro, a devout Catholic and the father of 9 children, 55-year-old Antonio Cast does not hide his admiration for Pinochet and the infamous Chicago Boys who transformed Chile the first, in the world’s first experimental laboratory of neoliberalism. Opposite him is 35-year-old Gabriel Boric, leader of the large 2011 student movement from the out-of-parliamentary left and then an independent MP whose candidacy was backed by the Communist Party.
Chile now appears as the representative mirror of the abysmal contrasts that run from one end of Latin America to the other. Although we will not find in Chile the extensive slums that haunt Brazil and other Chilean neighbors, Chile is a country where its society displays
the most provocative social inequalities between OECD countries. The complacency of the ruling parties about the relatively high rates of economic growth sounded like an insult to the 6 out of 10 households that are below or close to the poverty line. The accumulated discomfort for this social inequality, especially for the private system of pensions and tuition fees at universities, led to the giant rallies of 2019, where the youth of the popular classes played a leading role.
In order to avoid the threatened general uprising, the center-right President Sebastian Pinera, one of the richest people in the country, was forced to accept a referendum on the revision of the Pinochet Constitution, a central demand of the protesters, approved in the 2020 elections with 78% of the vote (please read the analyses entitled “New Era for Chile: Revision of the Constitution Passed” & “Policies to reduce Social Economic Disparities in Chile“) In the elections for the Constituent Assembly in May 2021, the left-wing candidates, organized and disorganized, secured a clear majority. In this light, Boric’s high turnout in the November 21 elections is not surprising.
On the contrary, Antonio Cast’s debut caused a real shock in the progressive political space. The far-right candidate backed his campaign with a tough policy on law and order, investing in phobias of the entry of one million immigrants (mostly from Venezuela and Haiti) into the north of the country and the violent uprising of the Mapuche natives in the south. In addition, he took advantage of the moral disrepute of the ruling center-right with Piniera escaping at the last minute the reference to financial scandals and his name appearing in the revelations of the Pandora Papers.
The key role in the December elections will be played by the economist Franco Paris, who was the great mystery of the elections. The candidate ran an election campaign from Alabama, USA, where he lives, citing family problems, while the bad language said that he does not risk his arrest as he is accused of scandals. Nevertheless, he came in third with 12.8%, emphasizing in his way a central trend of our time that does not only concern Chile: the fragmentation of traditional parties and the emergence of new personalities, usually without a clear ideological identity and with a strongly populist multi-party discourse.
