2021 Chilean general election

“If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism in Latin America, it will also be its grave”

Gabriel Boric

On November 21, 2021, a general election was held in Chile to determine the President of the Republic, alongside the parliamentary and the regional elections.

The presidential election saw seven candidates in all – the most prominent among them being the candidate for the left-wing Social Convergence coalition Gabriel Boric, and the candidate for right-wing Christian Social Front coaliton Jose Antonio Kast.

Background

In 2019, massive demonstrations across the country erupted in response to the increases in train fares for the Santiago Metro, but came to encompass a reaction against the rising cost of living, political corruption, privatisation, and the sharp inequality in the country. A high point in the protests was La marcha más grande de Chile or “the biggest march of Chile” – which true to its name, saw on 25th October 2019, the mobilisation of 1.2 million people in the capital of Santiago, and a further 1.8 million across the country. The demand was for the end of neoliberalism, and the resignation of President Sebastian Pinera – the principal oligarch of Chile. Government response was the declaration of a state of emergency, and the mobilisation of the security services resulting in mass arrests, mass detainments, torture, sexual assault, and murder. The counter-response saw the emergence of a loosely-organised group of protesters clad in black hoods dubbed Primera Linea, or “The Front Line”. Primera Linea deployed a diverse array of tactics in opposition to the police, including stone-throwing, laser pointing and shield-baring. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they set up mutual aid networks once the protests died down in response to lockdown measures.

A massive crackdown saw over 2,000 arrests and the detainment of 600 protesters – collectively dubbed “the prisoners of the revolt”. Left-wing parties, including Broad Front, along with the UN, Amnesty International, and various human rights groups criticized the government’s human rights abuses and demanded the release of those incarcerated during the protests. The combined pressure from the protests and international scrutiny ultimately forced several concessions from the Pinera government, the first of which involved the reshuffling of key government ministers – most notably the sacking of the Interior Minister Andres Chadwick – a Pinochet holdover. The next was a freezing of energy bills, an increase in spending towards pensions, an announcement of a progressive tax targeting the country’s highest earners, and a reduction of salaries for public officials. A referendum on the 1980 national constitution was announced to take place in April 2020, yet COVID-19 pushed the date to the year anniversary of La marcha más grande de Chile: Chileans were given the choice to either replace it, or to keep it – with 78.3% voting for the change, discarding another relic of the Pinochet legacy. With Chile slowly coming out of lockdown, the demonstrations revved back up again in light of police brutality being deployed against a 16-year old boy. Opposition leaders demanded the police chief Mario Rozas resign, or they defund the police, leading to the offending officer’s arrest and the resignation of Rozas in November 2020.

The central figures

Gabriel Boric first became involved in politics joining libertarian socialist organisation Autonomus Left. He is a former student protest leader involved in the protests between 2011 to 2013, seeking to overturn the Chilean school voucher system – an enduring feature of Pinochet-era privatization. His current political orientation can best be described as a democratic socialist. He became a member of the Chamber of Deputies in 2014, running as an independent candidate. In 2017, he founded the Broad Front: a coalition of leftist parties and grassroots organisations. Boric stood on a platform to relegate the neoliberalism within Chile “to the grave”, recreate the Chilean welfare state “so that everyone has the same rights no matter how much money they have in their wallet.” He wishes to reduce the average working week from 45 hours to 40, pursue green investment in industry, and reform the pension system. Boric’s strategy had been to build a wide-ranging electoral base that extended even beyond the Chilean left – a tactic which precipitated a moderation of his left-wing platform, assuring investors in the privatised Chilean pension system that he seeks to heal the fractures in Chile, and he seeks to improve business investments to the country. Boric is a supporter of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions or BDS. Social Convergence – the coalition he represents, is a member of the Progressive International – the outfit of Yanis Varoufakis and Jane Sanders. Boric has received endorsements from a variety of left-wing political figures and activists around the globe, including Jeremy Corbyn, Rashida Tlaib, Zarah Sultana, Noam Chomsky, Ana Tijoux, Naomi Klein, Slavoj Zizek, and Owen Jones.

Jose Antonia Kast, or JAK – is described as an ultra-conversative and a man on the far-right, dubbed “the Chilean Bolsonaro”. His father was a Nazi Party member who fled to Chile and started a sausage company, which is the basis of his family’s wealth. His brother Miguel Kast was one of the original “Chicago Boys” who ushered in the “Chilean experiment” with neoliberalism under Pinochet as the country’s labor minister and President of the Central Bank. Kast had notably voted for Pinochet to continue his rule for another eight years in the 1988 referendum – a referendum which Pinochet lost, reintroducing multi-party elections. Kast in the 2017 election campaigned to give amnesty to those convicted for human rights abuses under the Pinochet regimes on the basis of age-related illness. Kast draws upon a very conservative (and very white) form of Catholicism as the basis for his anti-feminist, anti-LGBTQ+, and anti-communist platform. As part of his hostility towards immigration, he said that the border to Bolivia should be closed in light of drug trafficking, stoked anti-immigrant fury against Venezuelan refugees, and proposed the Chilean equivalent of the the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement department or ICE – infamous for its detention facilities holding up to 20,000 people. As the founder of the Republican Party political coalition, he mobilised a base playing on the anxieties around the 2019 protests that erupted around the country, blaming them on terrorists and foreigners. Kast received endorsements from Eduardo Bolsonaro – the son of Jair Bolsonaro, and Spanish far-right party Vox.

Result

Amidst allegations of voter suppression, turnout saw 7.1 million votes out of 15 million (47.3%) in the first round, granting Kast the lead with 1.96m votes (27.91%), with Boric the closest rival with 1.81m votes (25.82%) – However, the second round of voting was what ultimately determined the final result. In a total of 8.2 million votes, Boric led with 4.62m votes (55.9%) while Kast gained 3.7m (44.1%), leaving Boric as the victor. When he is inaugurated on 11th March 2022, Boric will become the youngest leader in Chilean history, and the second youngest world leader.

Conclusion

The victory of Gabriel Boric is the latest and likely conclusive symbolic triumph over the Pinochet era which cast a long shadow over Chile for nearly five decades. It is culmination of a highly concerted effort to abort the Chilean neoliberal experiment going back as far as the student protests the decade before, and reaching critical mass by the very end of the 2010s. For Progressive International, this is its greatest electoral accomplishment since its founding, and the implications carry a sense of promise for the ‘second iteration’ or at least the revitalization of the “Pink Tide”, which within the past two years saw socialist leaders come, or return to power – as in Peru, Bolivia, Mexico, Nicaragua and Honduras. However, they also carry a sense of foreboding at least in the obstacles that have been faced and still remain issues in the governments that the Pink Tide produced. Pink Tide governments came to power on electoral alliances to secure their authority, and the social welfare programs issued from the benefits of an early 2000s China commodity boom which saw great demand for the national exports eg. coal gas, minerals, soy etc. eventually drying up. Many of these governments as a result had their social reforms ossify or outright issue in austerity and neoliberal measures to stave off political opponents, or the twitchy fingers of a longstanding regional hegemon – the United States, to varying degrees of success. The US has a habit of creating or worsening political and economic destabilisation, and outright supporting coups against countries under a socialist program seeking economic independence in the Americas. Boric, as with the other left-wing leaders in the region before him, promised a future beyond neoliberalism. In a country with one of the sharpest economic divisions, a coalition of political parties with differing agendas and the grassroots movements riding on the promise of a transformative project, a significant right-wing faction occupying its legislative chambers, questions of alliances in the international sphere, and the ever-watchful gaze of the United States observing events play out, it remains to be seem how effectively Boric will be able to pursue the agenda of deep social reforms, based on a environmental, feminist and indigenous agenda.

See also

• The other 9/11
• Salvador Allende
• Augusto Pinochet
• The Chilean uprising of 2019-2021
• Pink tide
• Blue tide
• “Post-neoliberalism”
• Progressive International
• revolutionary social democracy
• “Milennial socialism”