What did we see this Sunday? Beyond the result—decisive and beyond appeal—the first thing to note is the functioning of the system: in a little under two hours after the polls closed, the Electoral Service had already counted close to 97% of the votes. At that point, the conservative José Antonio Kast was surpassing 58.2%, with more than seven million votes. While some were writing on social media “se acaBoric,” (It’s over for Boric) others joked about “four years of Kastigo.” The main political actors, meanwhile, displayed republican behavior and an unmistakable commitment to democracy.
But the true significance of this election lies in the emergence of a new cleavage that structured the vote. For the first time since the return to democracy, Chile has a president who voted Yes in the 1988 plebiscite—to decide whether Pinochet would remain in power—and who also actively participated in Pinochet’s campaign. Former president Piñera, let us recall, had voted No. This fact alone would have been unthinkable for decades, not because the right could not win—indeed, it already had—but because the dictatorship/anti-dictatorship cleavage functioned as a symbolic structuring limit. That limit today no longer organizes Chilean politics, as I argue in a recent study titled “Restoration vs. Refoundation: How the 2019–2023 cycle reconfigured Chilean political conflict.”
The 2025 election not only marks a change of government; it marks something deeper: the displacement of the axis that ordered political competition for more than 25 years. The territorial evidence is eloquent. The electoral map of this election resembles far more closely the 2022 exit plebiscite—in which the proposal for a new Constitution drafted by a largely progressive convention was rejected—and, to a lesser extent, the 2023 constitutional text, than any vote associated with the democratic transition. Municipalities that voted Reject in 2022 realigned in almost identical fashion in 2025. By contrast, the explanatory weight of the 1988 plebiscite fades once the recent cycle is incorporated.
This is neither a metaphor nor an impressionistic intuition: it is an observable territorial realignment. When elections from 1988 to the present are systematically compared, the pattern is clear. The 2025 vote replicates almost point by point the geography of the 2022 plebiscite. The old democracy–dictatorship cleavage survives as a symbolic identity, but it has ceased to decisively structure electoral competition.
What replaces it? A different axis, born from the cycle opened in 2019: restoration versus refoundation. This new axis is not defined by positions toward the dictatorship, but by opposing interpretations of the social uprising, public order, and the constituent process. For the restoration pole, the uprising represented a breakdown of order, an erosion of state authority, and an institutional drift that must be corrected. For the refoundation pole, it was the legitimate expression of accumulated discontent and evidence of an exhausted model requiring profound transformations.
The presidential campaign showed this clearly. Both the right-wing opposition candidate Kast and the left-wing pro-government candidate Jara structured their diagnoses around the 2019–2023 cycle, not around the authoritarian past. The difference lay in emphasis: Kast spoke mainly about how to achieve order—public security, control, state capacity—while Jara focused on the what of transformation—social rights, the role of the state. But neither organized their narrative around the dictatorship/democracy axis. Its virtual absence is as revealing as its former omnipresence.
This displacement is not limited to discourse. It is also visible in elite alignments. Figures historically associated with the No of 1988 have supported candidacies located in the restoration pole. The most surprising case is that of former president Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle: son of a president murdered by the dictatorship and a symbol of the transition, he now endorses positions that would have been unthinkable under the old cleavage. From the perspective of comparative theory, this type of “crossing the Rubicon” is a classic signal of the structural weakening of a historical axis.
Some will say this is merely alternation, disapproval of the outgoing government, or a protest vote. But that explanation does not fit the data. Alternation produces oscillations; it does not generate such high and persistent territorial correlations between elections of different types, nor does it simultaneously reorder the discourse of both blocs around the same interpretive cycle.
What we are seeing is something else: it is, possibly, a cleavage in formation. Not fully institutionalized, still lacking complete organizational anchoring, but already powerful enough to structure the vote, campaigns, and elite strategies.
It is worth pausing on one point. This axis does not describe closed government projects nor does it allow us to anticipate future democratic trajectories. Restoration and refoundation do not equate to moderation or radicalization, nor to more or less democracy. They are interpretive frameworks through which political actors and electorates process the cycle opened in 2019: different diagnoses about order, legitimacy, and change. Confusing this axis with a normative evaluation of governments would be a mistake.
The reference to “the 30 years” succinctly captures this new axis. In Chile, that expression became popular during the 2019 social uprising through the slogan “it’s not 30 pesos, it’s 30 years,” referring not to the specific rise in public transportation fares, but to the three decades following the end of the dictatorship. That cycle was marked by institutional stability, economic growth, and gradual reforms, but also by persistent inequalities and a growing distance between citizens and elites. For some, the uprising represented an unjustified rupture of an order that had produced substantial advances; for others, it was evidence of an exhausted model demanding profound transformations. This difference is not anecdotal: today it structures political competition far more decisively than positions toward the authoritarian regime of the past.
The 2025 election does not close this process. But it makes one thing clear: the dictatorship–democracy axis has ceased to be the central organizing principle of Chilean politics. The country today debates how to interpret and close—or deepen—the crisis opened in 2019. Reading this scenario as a mere repetition of the cleavages of the transition, or as if we were still in 1988, is simply to fail to understand the nature of current political tensions.
Autor
Political scientist. Professor and Director of the Institute of Political Science of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. PhD in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame. Author of "Citizenship and Contemp. Direct Democracy" (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
