By David Altman
At first glance, Sunday’s results seem to anticipate a Copernican shift in the country’s value orientation, outlining—according to all surveys based on plausible second round scenarios—an eventual 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, they found no other space available than the right. People did not get “angry”; rather he moved away from the left, at least for now. Although there is a conservative shift in issues of order and security, the evidence does not show a structural rightward movement in broader values; What prevails is a reaction to political performance rather than a profound ideological turn. These elections should be read more as the failure of the left than as the triumph of the right.
Given this, the inevitable question arises: how did the Boric government fail for so many of its supporters to abandon it? To answer it, unfortunately, it is necessary to go back to the concertationist governments since the democratic transition.
During the first fifteen years we inhabited what was labeled “the Chilean miracle”: human development, economic growth, rule of law and low levels of corruption. But that same success became a vulnerability with the rapid expansion of precarious middle sectors and the persistence of inherited and rigid institutions (for example, the electoral system), incapable of absorbing new citizen demands.
If I am forced to mark a turning point, I would place it long before the social outbreak of 2019, specifically in the second term of President Bachelet (2014–2018). During that period, Bachelet promoted an almost irresponsible deluge of simultaneous reforms—tax, educational, labor, electoral and even constitutional (Self-convened Local Meetings, town councils)—that awakened latent tensions and generated new ones. The intensity of the reform cycle was such that even the most expert analysts had difficulty following the detail and implications of each initiative. Rather than being the direct cause of subsequent instability, Bachelet II’s simultaneous reforms acted as a catalyst that exposed tensions built up years before. In several ways, they stirred up the hornet’s nest.
It was precisely in the following government, that of Piñera II (2018–2022), where this chain of tensions ended up exploding with the already well-known “social outbreak” of October 2019. A crisis that could only be contained by the outbreak of the pandemic, which in a way fit the then government like a glove.
Thus we arrive at the Boric government, elected with an enormous dose of votes “borrowed” from the center, in a country exhausted by instability. His administration aligned itself with the reformist impetus of the first Constitutional Convention, whose draft—more akin to a disjointed collage of changes driven by a mosaic of fragmented groups under a mirage of a nonexistent majority—ended up being a spectacular failure and a missed opportunity. By that time, large sectors of citizens were already hungry for stability.
That was the first big blow for Boric, almost a knockout. Then came the second constitutional process, which also failed. Although the text was also rejected, that second rejection was read as a triumph for the right, because it meant maintaining the the state in which institutional.
Although it does not translate into political offer, a large sector of Chilean society remains at the center of the ideological spectrum. The emptying of the center’s offer – especially sectors of the former Concertación – electorally subsidized Boric in 2021 and today it subsidizes the right. This suggests a political supply problem, not a deep ideological realignment. The collapse of the center does not respond to a disappearance of its voters, but to the inability of its parties to articulate a credible moderate project after years of institutional wear and tear, internal crises and loss of narrative. The right not only capitalized on the hollowing out of the center; He also managed to articulate an effective story of order, stability and institutional control in a country saturated with uncertainty.
Boric believed that he had a mandate for systemic transformation and did not read that, after so many years of tension, citizens were exhausted of reforms. The government combined a lack of executive experience with an overestimation of its reform mandate, leading to early strategic errors and an accelerated loss of political capital. At first their government was perceived as naive—they had never governed—but when naivety quickly gave way to arrogance, citizens began to distance themselves. Unlike Piñera or Bachelet, Boric had just a couple of weeks of “honeymoon”; After that, his evaluation and that of his government became negative.
It was at that moment when the old Concertación lent clothes and contributed to stabilizing management with the arrival of two “super ministers” of its historical DNA: Mario Marcel in the Treasury and Carolina Tohá in the Interior.
One of the issues that most stressed the government was security, which systematically appears among the main citizen concerns in all surveys. It is not necessarily that there is more crime – the debate is complex – but that violence mutated into forms previously unknown in Chile (narcotics, Tren de Aragua, organized crime). In politics, perception weighs as much or more than statistics: security became the main prism from which citizens evaluated the government. In this area, the right managed to position itself as the most credible force to recover institutional control.
The left must carry out a deep self-criticism, and the right must resist the temptation to believe that these majorities belong to it. The left faces a deep crisis of credibility and strategic reading of the political moment; The right, for its part, would be wrong to interpret its current support as a lasting conversion, since it rests more on citizen exhaustion than on stable ideological adherence.
David Altman is Professor at the Institute of Political Science of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. Director of Public Space.