The result of the latest presidential election held on Sunday 14 in Chile undoubtedly allows for multiple interpretations. The conservative right-wing candidate, a member of the Republican Party, obtained 58.1% of the vote—a resounding result that was replicated in all regions of the country and is unprecedented in the electoral history of the right. In contrast, the candidate Jeannette Jara, from the Communist Party and backed by a broad spectrum of left-wing parties, reached 41.8%.
The first thing that stands out is that this is the first time, since the return to democracy, that a right-wing candidate has achieved a victory of this magnitude. Runoff elections indeed tend to create artificial majorities; however, in the two previous electoral victories of the right, in 2010 and 2017, with the triumph of Sebastián Piñera—representative of a more liberal right critical of the dictatorship—there was no result close to that of this election.
This electoral outcome, together with the various electoral processes that have taken place since 2019, constitutes yet another symptom of a reconfiguration of the political cleavage in Chile. This explanation emphasizes the political and agential dimension of the cleavage over its social dimensions, maintaining that these are “politically constructed.”
What does this election mean in the Chilean political process?
One of the ideas that has begun to take hold is that these results—both those of the parliamentary elections and those of the first round of the presidential election, as well as Kast’s election as president—express the configuration of a new political cleavage, displacing the democracy–authoritarianism axis that had been in place since the late 1980s and that structured political debate until 2010.
There are interpretations, such as that of political scientist David Altman, which suggest the possible configuration of a new cleavage. I adhere to this reading based on a change of era in Chilean society and its electoral fluctuations, together with the emergence of ideas aimed at defining public problems and reducing uncertainty for actors and voters. This process is also expressed in the emergence and reordering of party forces, based on new political diagnoses disseminated by different agents.
The notion of political cleavage was developed in the Chilean case by scholars Torcal and Mainwaring (2003) to analyze the post-authoritarian legacies of the party system, particularly the axis between opponents and defenders of the “Pinochet regime” (1973–1990). These authors add that cleavages not only derive from social divisions, but are also shaped by political agency.
The changes that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s profoundly transformed Chilean society. The process of modernization reconfigured the State and its relationship with the market, reduced poverty, and strengthened a middle class that was nonetheless distant from the State. At the same time, social behaviors were modified, privileging consumption and individualism, weakening the social fabric and ties with parties, and favoring, in certain sectors, more post-material and identity-based values.
This process altered citizens’ horizons of expectation, who, despite experiencing material improvements, began to show signs of social fatigue and discontent. Education, presented as the main path of social mobility, became one of the great triumphs and also one of the great disappointments of the model, according to different interpretations. The student mobilizations of 2006 and 2011 were early signs of this exhaustion.
The diagnosis of the crisis of the “neoliberal model,” emerging from the 2011 student movement, constituted the ideological foundation upon which the Broad Front consolidated itself as a new relevant political actor, eventually reaching the Presidency in the 2022–2025 period. This diagnosis pointed to the economic model inherited from the dictatorship and promoted an agenda of structural reforms, supporting the second government of Michelle Bachelet (2014–2018) and, later, interpreting the social uprising of October 2019 as an overall questioning of the economic and political order.
However, the violence associated with the “social uprising” (2019) and the impact of the migratory phenomenon struck deeply across broad sectors of society. The proposal of the Constitutional Convention supported by President Gabriel Boric failed to adequately incorporate these concerns and tended to interpret the discontent as a sum of identity-based demands, which led to its resounding rejection in the 2022 plebiscite.
On the right, the initial response was limited. The traditional right, despite attaining the Presidency in 2018, maintained a predominantly technocratic discourse that lost explanatory capacity after the October 2019 crisis. José Antonio Kast, having split from the conservative UDI, articulated an alternative political project from 2017 onward, founding the Republican Party, critical of the reforms promoted during Michelle Bachelet’s second government and of identity-based policies, under a narrative of institutional decline with moral overtones.
This discursive framework, initially immature—evidenced by Kast’s defeat in the 2021 presidential campaign and by the failure of the second constitutional proposal led by the Republicans in 2023—was refined over time and gained resonance in a context marked by insecurity, migration, and economic stagnation. In this election, Kast managed to impose a framing that displaced the narrative of the Communist Party candidate, Jeannette Jara, centered on social gaps, threats to rights, and authoritarian risks.
Paraphrasing the U.S. researcher and philosopher George Lakoff, Kast’s discourse appealed to the figure of a “strict father” who promises to restore lost order in the face of a left that offers a “nurturing family” to the social uncertainty of Chilean families. This result shows that Kast succeeded in agencing a set of ideas that reordered the right around the notion of a “crisis of the State,” whose solution is framed in terms of “effort,” “freedom,” and “order.”
Thus, structural transformations, the “social uprising,” and the constituent processes shaped a period in which discussion intensified around the social and value changes of Chilean society, forming the framework within which a new cleavage was politically molded. Kast’s unprecedented success suggests that, at least for now, he was the one who managed to agency it most effectively. Nevertheless, it is not without risks, since the narrative of decline will have to give way to recognition of a socially more complex Chile and to the construction of a future horizon for his sector.
Autor
Political scientist and tenured professor in the Department of Sociology, Political Science and Public Administration at the Catholic University of Temuco (Chile). PhD in History and Master's in Political Science from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.
