Buscador
Chile: Between two rounds and a new electoral map
Chile reaches the second round with high turnout and a political system shaken by fragmentation and the end of old balances.
2025 Elections: The two axes of Chilean politics
The Chilean social outbreak of 2019 was the result of an accumulation of frustrations over unfulfilled expectations, a lack of institutional adaptation, and a growing disconnect between citizens and the state.
Chile: The collapse of the center and the illusion of a shift to the right
At first glance, Sunday's results appear to signal a Copernican shift in the country's values, indicating—according to all polls based on plausible second-round scenarios—a potential return of the right to power. This conclusion, however, may be misleading. In my opinion, what happened is that a significant number of Chileans abandoned the left, and faced with the implosion of the political center, found no other space available than the right. People did not become “right-wing”; rather, they moved away from the left, at least for now. While there is a conservative shift on issues of order and security, the evidence does not show a structural shift to the right in broader values; what prevails is a reaction to political performance rather than a profound ideological shift. These elections should be read more as a failure of the left than as a triumph of the right. This raises the inevitable question: where did Boric's government fail that so many of its supporters abandoned it? To answer this, unfortunately, we must go back to the Concertación governments since the transition to democracy. During the first fifteen years, we experienced what was labeled “the Chilean miracle”: human development, economic growth, the rule of law, and low...