Another swing of the pendulum in Chile

Chile goes to the polls on Sunday for presidential and congressional elections. Presidents cannot serve consecutive terms, so incumbent Gabriel Boric will not be on the ballot. It’s a virtual certainty that no-one will win a first-round majority, so a runoff will be held four weeks later, on 14 December, but it’s not yet clear who the final two will be.

For twenty years after the return of democracy in 1989, Chile’s presidents were all from the centre-left. By 2010, however, voters evidently felt it was again safe to risk a president from the centre-right, and Sebastián Piñera was elected for a four-year term. Since then the two sides have alternated: the centre-left’s Michele Bachelet served from 2014 to 2018, then Piñera returned for four years, then Boric was elected in 2021 (taking office in March 2022).

The coalitions on each side, however, have fractured. Boric represented not the centre-left but the far left, more than doubling the centre-left’s vote in the first round last time. And in the runoff he faced a far-right candidate, José Antonio Kast, who topped the poll in the first round, well clear of the centre-right. Boric prevailed with a comfortable 55.9% of the second-round vote, leaving the party system in some disarray.

Boric’s administration has not been a great success, although Chile has certainly seen worse. He has shown no sign of imitating the anti-democratic practices of his comrades in Nicaragua or Venezuela. But the economy has been sluggish, legislative gridlock has frustrated much of his program (the right has a majority in the Senate while the lower house is evenly balanced), and his popularity ratings dropped sharply early in his term and have never recovered.

There are eight candidates for president, of whom five should be taken seriously. From (approximately) left to right they are former minister Jeanette Jara, of the Communist Party but endorsed by a broad left and centre-left coalition; economist Franco Parisi, centrist-populist, making his third attempt; 2013 runner-up Evelyn Matthei, of the mainstream centre-right; 2021 runner-up Kast, also running for the third time; and self-styled “libertarian” Johannes Kaiser, who broke away from Kast’s party and seems even more hostile to democracy.

Opinion polls have consistently put Jara in the lead with something like 30% of the vote. Kast at first seemed the clear front-runner among the rest; he probably still is, but his support has been dropping and is now in the low 20s, not far ahead of Matthei, whose vote has been fairly steady, and Kaiser, who has been gaining at the expense of Kast. Parisi is back in fifth place but not absolutely out of contention at around 10%.

Jara’s lead looks like nowhere near enough to overcome the right-of-centre candidates pooling their support in the second round, even assuming a fair bit of leakage. Second round polls have her losing heavily to either Kast or Matthei, generally by double-digit margins. Kaiser’s lead in the hypothetical polls is much smaller, so Jara’s only hope is if he can continue his recent rise and make it to the runoff – but it would be unwise to hope for that, since he may well still win.

If Jara’s supporters are looking to vote strategically, they would probably do more good for their country by switching to Matthei, to try to get her into the runoff and thus prevent a victory by Kast or Kaiser. Otherwise voters next month will again be reduced to a choice between far right and far left.