Supporters of far-right presidential candidate Jose Antonio Kast, of the Republican Party, attend a rally ahead of the presidential runoff election in Temuco, Chile, on Thursday.Esteban Felix/The Associated Press
Eloísa González remembers the day the subway turnstiles marked a line in the sand in Chile.
As a university student in 2019, she was stationed at Santiago’s Los Leones metro, monitoring and supporting a protest against a fare hike led by high school students. The youth were jumping turnstiles as part of the campaign. But the protest escalated on Oct. 18, and thousands of people poured onto the streets in a massive demonstration against Chile’s neoliberal economic model that had created a deeply unequal country. The mobilization stretched on for months and became known as “estallido social” – the social outbreak.
“There was a collective sense of liberation,” said Ms. González, 31, now a journalist, rolling a cigarette while seated in a sidewalk coffee shop in Santiago. “It was so broad based, so massive, it really felt like there was the possibility of real change – not that it spelled the end of capitalism but that there were concrete things that could change.”
But six years and two failed attempts at rewriting Chile’s dictatorship-era constitution later, there is a palpable disillusionment with the outgoing left-of-centre government, and the country appears poised to make a radical turn to the right in this weekend’s presidential elections.
It’s a striking turn of events after the rage and effervescence of the estallido social. Yet, for many observers, it is a continuation of that discontent, only this time flowing in another direction. Most political demands of the uprising remain unanswered. And the pandemic hangover of isolation and economic stagnation has fuelled rhetoric and, ultimately, public demands around immigration, rising crime and weak economic growth.
Jose Antonio Kast waves to supporters next to his wife Maria Adriasola during his closing campaign rally in Temuco on Thursday.EITAN ABRAMOVICH/AFP/Getty Images
The issues have featured prominently in the presidential campaign. After a first round of voting last month, two contenders remain for the runoff vote on Sunday: centre-left coalition leader and Communist Party member Jeannette Jara, and far-right Republican Party leader José Antonio Kast. Polls suggest the support of other right-wing candidates has gravitated toward Mr. Kast, who is widely predicted to clinch victory.
“What we have been seeing in Chile for some time is an anti-political class sentiment,” said Juan Pablo Luna, the Diamond Brown Chair of Democratic Studies at McGill University and previously a professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. “There has been this search for alternative leaders.”
This has most clearly manifested in a candidate who didn’t make it to the second round. Franco Parisi launched his own party a few years ago called Partido de la Gente – the People’s Party – and secured a surprising 20 per cent in the first round, not far behind Mr. Kast, who had 24 per cent and Ms. Jara who grazed 27 per cent.
Like Argentina’s President Javier Milei, Mr. Parisi, also a television economist, represents a familiar brand of outsider – someone who builds a following by taking verbal sniper shots at the political class, and connects with young voters with an online strategy made for these viral times.
In contrast, Mr. Kast, who has two previous failed presidential bids, has run a very tightly scripted campaign focused on “order” and an “emergency” plan for a country he claims is “falling apart.” On the campaign trail he has alternated between warnings to undocumented migrants he says he will expel, and hand-picking ripe tomatoes for shoppers at a market.
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In recent years, Chile, a country of 18 million, has seen a sharp increase in migrants, who represent roughly 10 per cent of the population. Venezuelans fleeing the authoritarian regime of Nicolás Maduro now number between 500,000 and 665,000, with the greatest influx arriving since 2016.
The perception that many Chileans have of out-of-control migration has also fuelled fears over public safety, in part because of the rise of Venezuelan organized crime, and an uptick in violent crime in general, although crime rates are among the lowest in the region.
“Today, young people, just like in Argentina, just like in the United States, have turned to the right,” noted Prof. Luna. Mr. Kast, whose father was a German immigrant and Nazi party member (which Mr. Kast has denied previously), emerged as a somewhat moderate option compared to another more extreme right winger, shifting attention away from his own socially conservative views.
“I’m of the view that he has not actually moderated, that he is making a strategic shift for the campaign, and that a fairly radical government is on the horizon, at least in terms of his narrative,” said Prof. Luna of Mr. Kast.
In a campaign stop in Santiago this month, Ms. Jara, the former labour minister, packed a conference room to speak with small business leaders, entrepreneurs and co-operatives. Dozens of the attendees, many of them older women, crowded around Ms. Jara as she announced a new economic relief plan for indebted Chileans.
A woman holds Chile's national flag on Thursday, the day of one of Jose Antonio Kast's last closing campaign rallies.Juan Gonzalez/Reuters
Her candidacy is remarkable in a country where politics are dominated by the establishment. She comes from a working class family, and often notes she doesn’t have the privilege of a last name with connections.
Watching the news conference, Victoria Quilaqueo, a professor turned baker, sighed at reporters who lobbed questions about Ms. Jara’s “confrontational” style during debates.
“I could never vote for the right, much less the extreme right,” said Ms. Quilaqueo, 49. “I have very close family members who receive the minimum wage, which even though it went up, continues to be too little to maintain a family with three children.”
Daniela Ocaranza, who lives in a low-income neighbourhood in Santiago and volunteers with an organization that fights for affordable housing, is worried about what Mr. Kast is not saying, specifically around how he plans to cut US$6-billion from the Chilean budget.
“He talks a lot about security, but the most important thing is social security, where I can have a roof, where I can have health, and good food,” said Ms. Ocaranza. “I am very afraid that we are going to lose rights that we have fought for.”
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There is also a clear apathy with politics among Chileans. Voting participation rates have been low for years, often not reaching 50 per cent, leading officials to bring back mandatory voting after it was removed in 2012.
Listening to a morning debate broadcast on national radio, as he arranged women’s lingerie in a cart that he sells goods from in the city centre, Claudio Acevedo expressed some of that frustration. “I’m so disappointed with politicians,” said the 57-year-old, adding he is more inclined to go with Mr. Kast because he doesn’t “want to have anything to do with the left.”
Jaime Alvarado also says he is left choosing between the “lesser of two evils.”
“Either Kast wins, or this country is going to stall for another four years,” said Mr. Alvarado, 57, whose security installation business has suffered under Chile’s weak economic growth.
For Ms. González, the former university student activist, the attitude on the street is evidence of the structural problems that remain in Chile. Her grandmother was a left-wing journalist who fled to Montreal after the military coup of 1973 and the death of socialist president Salvador Allende.
Now, as a journalist herself, she says the feelings behind the estallido are still simmering. “The landscape is open, even if it doesn’t look like it.”