Chile’s presidential run-off on 14 December will mark the end of the government led by Frente Amplio, a platform of young progressive parties that disrupted a political system that for 30 years had been dominated by two coalitions: the traditional right and the centre-left.
“Frente Amplio is a historical exception: we were a flash in the pan associated with the student movement. No one planned that a few years later we would be in government, disputing a constitutional process. It was a very dizzying thing,” said Diego Ibáñez, a deputy for the party, days after the election’s first round on 16 November.
Ibáñez entered Congress in 2018, joining the parliamentary group of Gabriel Boric, who would be elected president four years later. Ibáñez was 29 years old at the time, and had a background as a student leader in Valparaíso, a port city near Santiago. Now 36, after two terms as a deputy, he will become the youngest senator in Chile’s history, having won a seat in the Senate at last month’s elections.
That fact, however, barely comes up in conversation. After Boric won the presidency in 2021, also at the age of 36, the youth of Chilean politicians ceased to be a selling point and became a biographical accessory, or even a burden.
“Those were dizzying years, and there was no way to predict the outcome of this power struggle. We couldn't, there was no way, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying,” Ibáñez said. “Boric himself... we never thought he would become president.”
In a 2018 interview, shortly after being re-elected to Congress, Boric flirted with taking a break from his political career. “What I would really like to do is write, that's my plan,” he said. A sophisticated reader and amateur poet, he dreamed of writing a novel about the student protests he had led a few years earlier.
But a combination of circumstances, chance and fortune led him to postpone his departure from politics. A year later, in 2019, the social uprising took place, a wave of mass protests that led to a collapse in the popularity of both Sebastián Piñera’s centre-right government and the centre-left opposition coalition that had been known as Concertación until 2013.
For the first time since the return to democracy, protesters were challenging the two main players in the democratic transition and the heirs to the economic model of the dictatorship that lasted from 1973 to 1990. Suddenly, there was room for a new candidate who was not tainted by the ghosts of the past.
All the polls for the 2021 election favoured the Communist Party. Despite being one of the oldest parties in Chile, it had barely participated in the political system of the transition, playing only a minor role in the second presidency of socialist Michelle Bachelet between 2014 and 2018.
The Communist candidate, Daniel Jadue, the mayor of a working-class district in Santiago, had to run in a July 2021 primary against a candidate from Frente Amplio, a left-wing coalition of small parties with roots in the university movement, which had won more than 20% of the vote in the 2017 elections.
Frente Amplio selected Boric as its candidate, in part because he was one of its few leaders who met the minimum age requirement to run, 35 years old. In any case, with Jadue tipped to become the next president, the coalition was merely a supporting character in the race, hoping mostly to boost its profile for the future.
Within months, Boric had won the primary and paved his way to the presidency, which he would ultimately win, defeating far-right candidate José Antonio Kast by 56% to 44%.
Among other unexpected factors, he benefited from the postponement of the primaries of the traditional centre-left parties, which had previously been known as Concertación but in 2021 were running under the umbrella of Unidad Constituyente (Constitutional Unity). In Chile, any registered voter can vote in one primary election, and it is thought that the delay to Unidad Constituyente’s race meant a portion of that coalition’s followers turned out to vote for Boric.
On the night of the primaries, Boric gave a speech tailored to his ambition, or at least to the expectations of his most loyal voters: “If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave,” he said.
This time around, the left-wing ruling coalition has expanded and now encompasses the entire centre-left. At the primaries in June, the Communists’ Jeanette Jara, Boric’s former labour minister, was chosen as the coalition’s presidential candidate with 60% of the vote. Frente Amplio’s candidate did not reach 10%.
But Jara, a 51-year-old lawyer and public administrator, won only 26.8% of the votes in the first round of the election last month, and now faces a difficult scenario for the run-off, in which all polls give the far-right’s Kast a lead of more than 15 points.
This is the first time a communist activist has made it to the election’s second round, and the first time in a long time that the left has been represented by a figure from working-class origins. But Jara’s programme barely reflects this, instead being dominated by security proposals – a sign of how Chilean politics has changed in recent years and the limitations of Boric's government, which is gambling with part of its legacy.
Hard landing
At the 2021 elections, Boric won just 25% of the first-round presidential vote, while the congressional vote left his coalition in a clear minority, with the distribution of seats being very similar to when the previous right-wing administration was in power.
Despite this Boric, took office on 11 March 2022 – his term will end on the same day in 2026 – and appointed a cabinet that was dominated by young people from Frente Amplio, but which also included some politicians from allied parties due to its lack of expertise in several areas.
“There were early signs that we failed to read clearly,” Boric said in his last public address in June 2025, when he took stock of his government and acknowledged that progressive forces had failed to come to terms with their minority position in Congress, the main obstacle to the reform programme.
The cold shower came on 4 September 2022, when 62% of the electorate rejected a proposal for a new progressive constitution. This was already being drafted by a constitutional convention when Boric took office, but it became seen as fundamental to the delivery of his manifesto, as it included measures that would make the political order more favourable to his government – such as removing power from the Senate, where the ruling party only had four seats – and social rights policies that were part of his platform.
Today, a common self-criticism within the government is that it tied its fate to the constitutional draft, whose defeat paralysed the programme of change.
“The mistake was to wait for the results of a convention that was hyper-fragmented,” said deputy Ibáñez. “We didn’t take advantage of the initial wave of legitimacy and approval to bring a more structural reform, such as tax reform, into the parliamentary debate.”
The tax reform was introduced in Congress a few months after the constitutional referendum and was rejected by just one vote. According to Ibáñez, it could have been passed earlier, and would have provided a better and larger tax collection to drive more ambitious changes, like reducing inequality.
After the constitutional defeat, Boric restructured the government, making room for figures from the old centre-left parties. This gave the government greater stability, while exposing its weakness: part of its transformative momentum had been lost.
Despite its challenges, under Boric’s government, poverty fell, inequality declined slightly, the economy grew by an average of 1.8% per year, and inflation fell from 11.6% to 4% today. His government also passed several important reforms, such as increasing the monthly minimum wage by more than 40% to 529,000 Chilean pesos (around $550) – one of the highest in Latin America – and reducing the working week from 45 to 40 hours. The success of both measures explains the candidacy of Jara, who was the labour minister for most of the administration.
Boric’s government also adopted the so-called Zero Co-Pay, which provided free medical care to all members of Fonasa, the national health insurance, in the public hospital network; put in motion a national care policy; adopted a national strategy for managing lithium, and managed to get the mining sector to start paying a tax that is distributed in low-revenue areas for regional and community development.
Its greatest achievement, however, was the reform of the pension system – another measure led by Jara – a debt owed by previous governments. This reform is probably the one that best exposes the government's dilemma.
The law restores employer contributions (which were eliminated by the privatisation reform of the Pinochet dictatorship), increases minimum pensions, and introduces social insurance, which in practice improves the situation of many pensioners, who in some cases will receive 20% more income. But the system will continue to be managed by the private Pension Fund Administrators, one of the main evils for protesters in the 2019 uprising. The reform, which for some sectors of the left was not far from the right-wing project, does not change the individualistic and mercantilist matrix of the Chilean pension system.
“The question is how to explain this government, which had important successes but was different from what it had promised. And that makes sense, because the scenario and the demands change, but there has been no narrative to explain this move,” said Noam Titelman, a founding member of Frente Amplio.
Titelman, who wrote the 2023 book The New Chilean Left: From the student marches to La Moneda and is now engaged in academic research, argues that the government’s lack of narrative contrasts with the tactics of Kast, who, after a few defeats, has appeared to abandon his hardline agenda and radical tone.
"Kast found a way to justify the change with the figure of the emergency government: he tells his electorate that he will prioritise security and migration issues over values,” Titelman told openDemocracy. “The government couldn’t make it”.
The government's course was also altered by a drastic rise in public perception of insecurity, following a spike in homicides in 2022 and a number of high-profile crimes. In his last public address, Boric boasted of having passed 60 laws that “allowed us to modernise our institutions in the face of new forms of crime”, a reference to organised crime, another new development in recent years.
This is an uncomfortable legacy for a part of the left that came to power promising to reform the Carabineros, the military police that violently repressed the 2019 uprising.
Boric also defended the sustained decline in irregular migration which, together with the control of inflation that the country has been experiencing since the pandemic, are the strong points in the government’s narrative ahead of the elections: “Chile is not falling apart,” the president said.
Who's afraid of Jeanette Jara?
“Chile is not falling apart,” Jara repeated a few days before the runoff, one of the few narratives she shares with the government.
Since her victory in the primaries, Jara has strategically distanced herself from both La Moneda (the presidential palace) and the leader of the Communist Party, Lautaro Carmona, with whom she has a tense relationship.
The former labour minister insists that she is no longer the communist candidate, but rather the candidate of a broad coalition that includes even centrist parties such as the Christian Democrats.
Jara affirms that her main focus is security. “Being able to live in peace is everyone's right,” she says. Although her speech has an economic and social stress (“the security of making ends meet”), her programme is based on measures such as raising wages, expanding certain social policies and controlling migration. “It does not include a single structural reform”, columnist Daniel Matamala wrote a few weeks ago. “The left is heading for something more serious than losing an election; it seems to have lost faith in its own convictions”.
When asked whether Jara had given up too much ground by embracing the centre, Bárbara Figueroa, the secretary general of the Communist Party and main liaison with the campaign command, replied that this debate transcends the election.
“There is a discussion about whether this is the time for the left to radicalise its positions in order to confront, as was done, for example, in Ireland or New York, or whether in this scenario, with a Congress against it and facing the far right, isn’t it better to take a path that allows you to build real power relations”, she told openDemocracy.
For Figueroa, it is up to the party, not the candidate who represents the centre-left alliance, to decide which course it will take. “The question is whether we need a Jeanette Jara who radicalises a narrative, or who does what it takes to ensure that we can come to power and then move, articulate and build”.
Ricardo Solari, a veteran leader of the Socialist Party who is also part of Jara's campaign team, thinks the candidate's main obstacle is to be seen as part of the government. “Chileans’ opinion of the government is critical. And the vote is determined by their stance on the government. To break with that, the candidate would have had to make an impossible shift for someone who was a minister for three years.”
According to polls, rejection of the government hovers around 60%.
“Rather than a campaign rowing against the electoral winds, this campaign is closing a cycle,” Solari said. This cycle was marked by the wave of student protests that began in 2011, Boric’s political origins, then expanded with the 2019 protests and led to a reconversion of the party system, to the detriment of traditional forces.
The rise of a new left aimed to embody discontent with the political system and an economy stagnant for more than a decade was halted by the 2022 constitutional defeat. But the system continues to evolve, and the view of the roots of that discontent has changed.
“Some see the uprising as a left-wing movement, and the Chileans voting for the centre and moderation in the constitutional referendum”, Titelman said. “But others assert that, rather than an ideological stance, what we are seeing is anti-politics, a drive similar to ‘they must all go’, which is expressed differently in each election”.
Kast's far right may pick up some of that sentiment, but the clearest sign of this trend was the vote for Franco Parisi, leader of the People's Party, a populist who claims to have no ideology and base his discourse on a frontal rejection of all political parties. He came in third at the first round, with almost 20% of the vote and 14 deputies who will be key for the next government.
Gathering a majority of Parisi’s votes is almost the only way for Jara to succeed, facing a right-wing bloc that exceeded 50% in the first round and is unified behind Kast. The polls predict a result close to 60-40 in favour of the far right.
Parisi delegated the decision of whom to support to a digital consultation among his supporters. Almost 80% opted for a null vote, although it is not known how many people voted. Jara has taken on board some of Parisi's proposals, such as removing taxes on medicines. “He's my new best friend,” she joked recently.
But Jara's rapprochement with Parisi's world reveals the lack of ties between a majority of the left and popular sectors far from urban centres, who perceive progressive parties as elitist.
Although the Communist Party, the left-wing force with the greatest social reach, also lost some of its representation, Frente Amplio is the main target.
“Parisi's emergence fills a narrative void that Frente Amplio was unable to fill,” deputy Ibáñez said. “We are talking about an emerging middle class, embracing meritocracy and enjoying its advances, a culture that has become distant from the cultural marks of the Chilean left. We have a class status that is very typical of university status.”
Parisi's support is strong in the north, a mining region accustomed to the circulation of money and consumption, but which considers itself abandoned by the state in terms of both migration control and the economy.
His progress was accompanied by another new feature of the Boric cycle: the compulsory voting, first adopted in the 2022 referendum, which added around five million voters who express greater distrust of the parties.
“Frente Amplio and the government are not forgiven for failing to keep their promise of austerity,” Solari, who recently left his post as an executive at leading pollster company Cadem “They were young people who had all the tools to deliver, they didn't, and they were severely punished for it.”
Solari was referring to cases of alleged corruption such as the Caso Convenios, a plot involving embezzlement between ministries and foundations linked to one of the Frente Amplio parties.
“According to our polls, Parisi's most popular promise was for the parties to lower their salaries”, he said. “People perceive the government promised austerity and then filled itself with advisers who earn extremely high salaries, which in many cases are their first salaries. It would be ridiculous to ask a young professional entering the civil service to lower her salary, but the problem then is not the behaviour, but the promise”.
Throughout the campaign trail, Jara has stressed her life story, marked by a childhood spent in a humble neighbourhood with working-class parents, to distance herself from the government's front line and appeal to disenchanted voters.
“The government moved forward with a country that was in a state of great uncertainty. The situation was very complex, and it has had its successes”, Figueroa, the secretary general of the Communist Party, said. “But I think one of its great difficulties has been the lack of dialogue with the social world”.
Figueroa had just returned from a trip to the north with the candidate who, among other announcements, promised to build a stadium there, the Arena Antofagasta.
“You may ask: Why do you want a stadium, with all the other things that may be needed? So you don't have to travel to Santiago to see a concert. Is that more important than a cancer centre?” Figueroa asked herself. “No. But it's also important for the population.”
Juan Elman
Alexis Cortés
Ariel Dorfman
Carolina Pérez Dattari
