Lessons from the election of Gabriel Boric for Chile and Latin America
Being a Chile-watcher these days can be confusing. Since 2006 there have been huge protests every few years about disparate issues, from education to healthcare to feminism. Anger boiled over in October 2019, when over a million people took to the streets in an uprising — or estallido–demanding greater equality and better public services. A month later politicians hashed out an accord that set in motion a process to rewrite the country’s constitution, which dates from the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990). The election to the assembly that is drafting the magna carta turned out surprise results, with many anti-system candidates and hard-leftists winning seats. It seemed that the culmination of a decade and a half of protest was sealed, and that Chile was decisively lurching leftward.
Then came general elections on November 21st 2021, and the narrative changed. Chileans handed José Antonio Kast, an ultraconservative candidate who openly defends the legacy of Pinochet, a slim victory in the first round of the presidential ballot. Right-wing parties increased their power in the Senate, too. Polls showed that Chileans had become weary of continuing protests, and cared more about crime and narco-trafficking than inequality.
Yet the plot twisted again on December 19th, when the first part of the story was reaffirmed. Gabriel Boric, a bearded, tattooed 35-year-old who leads a coalition between an umbrella party — the Broad Front (FA in Spanish)— and the Communist Party, won a decisive victory against Kast. Contrary to expectations, he won by a margin of eleven percentage points, taking the most votes of any candidate in Chilean history. When he enters the presidential palace in March 2022, he will be the youngest head of state in Chile in 200 years and bring with him a new generation of millennials who cut their teeth in student protests that erupted in 2011.
What to make of all this? Analysts will be studying the Chilean election for years to come, but I have three takeaways for now.
First is the enduring influence of the centre in Chile. Though Boric and his team have overthrown the generation of centre-left leaders that oversaw the transition from dictatorship to democracy, their influence has also been reaffirmed. After losing to Kast in the first round, Boric had to shift decisively towards the centre to broaden his appeal. The votes he got in November 21st were essentially the same he obtained in the left’s primaries in July. It hit home that the backing of a progressive, university-educated youth was not enough to win the presidency. He modified his programme three times in as many months before the second round, promising to make his economic proposals more gradual and moderate, and started talking much more about order and security, an issue the left has frequently failed to take seriously. Mr Boric may owe his decisive victory as much to a new generation as to the support of the old, who endorsed him in the second round.
This may also have repercussions on the constitutional convention. It needs to wrap up its work next July, and the new constitution will be put to a referendum a few months after. So far the work of the convention has had mixed results: on a symbolic level, it has been praised for having gender parity and reserved seats for indigenous people, who make up 12% of Chile’s population and have historically been excluded from the levers of power.
But it has also been beset by scandal and bickering. One of its members dropped out after it emerged he had lied about having cancer during his campaign trail. On the first day it met, some of the convention’s most radical members shouted over the national anthem that was being performed by a youth orchestra. Substantively, the convention has also had problems. One of its ethics rules undermines free speech by punishing anyone who “denies or omits” human rights abuses committed throughout Chile’s history, and the Communist Party led an attempt to circumvent rules meant to foster consensus within the assembly. All this hurt the body’s reputation.
If the constitution is to be approved, the convention may need to do as sharp a shift towards the centre as Mr Boric did in the second round. The average Chilean voter has long been — and continues to be — centrist rather than leftist. The assembly has a chance to show it will moderate on January 4th, when it will choose a new president and vice-president, who will replace the outgoing duo, considered by some as radical.
The story is thus not just that Boric and his allies have managed to change Chile’s institutions, but that Chile’s institutions — and their centrist, moderating, pull–have changed them.
The second takeaway has repercussions for politicians everywhere. Traditional parties must make room for new generations and find ways to respond earlier to social demands if they want to remain relevant. Chile had endured protests for 15 years before Boric was elected. Though centrist parties did respond to some demands, changes were often limited and hampered by an out-of-touch right that prevented deeper reform. Take the constitutional rewrite. For years, it was a focus of discontent, having been drafted under the dictatorship. Michelle Bachelet, a centre-left president, gathered hundreds of thousands of people in town halls towards the end of her second mandate, in 2018, to rewrite it. But when the centre-right president, Sebastián Piñera, came to power, he shelved the proposal.
Polls have consistently shown a steep decline in Chilean citizens’ identification with political parties, and electoral abstention is shockingly high. One study from the UN Development Programme reckoned that between 1990 and 2016, electoral participation fell more in Chile than any other country in the world except Madagascar. The party structures lost touch with their bases, and with it, their support. The core of the centre-left, the Christian Democrats, got almost 2ml votes in 1993. By 2017 they got only 616,000. This is all the more surprising because the centre-left coalition — known as the Concertación —oversaw a huge reduction in poverty (from 36% in 2000 to 9% in 2018), a fall in inequality (when measured by household surveys), and a near-tripling of GDP per capita between 1990 and 2015 (it’s now the highest in Latin America). Lesson? Grassroots politics matter.
What Boric’s generation did was find a constructive way to channel social demands in an institutional way. They created a coalition of leftist parties born of social movements, called the Broad Front, and competed for seats in Congress. Alongside their work in government, they supported street demands, from the 2016 protests against private pensions funds to massive feminist demonstrations in 2018. Most importantly, Boric–though not everyone in his coalition–supported the constitutional rewrite in 2019. By keeping one foot on the ground and one in politics, the Broad Front was seen as more responsive than traditional parties. In the election just gone, they managed to mobilise over a million extra voters between the first and second round, particularly young women and lower-income voters. This led to the highest electoral participation since voting stopped being mandatory in 2012.
The Broad Front’s maturation from social movement to institutional player has revindicated electoral democracy. The failure of the traditional parties to oversee deep structural change and let a new generation rise in the ranks has led to their collapse.
Third, Boric’s victory could breathe new life into the Latin American left. Boric is young, democratic, feminist and climate-conscious. As my previous blog-post noted, the leftist leaders that came to power during the so-called pink tide of the early 2000s were none of these things. They undermined liberal democracy and focused on extracting rents from natural resources. The latest leftists to enter the scene–Peru’s president, Pedro Castillo, and President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico–are not at all in tune with feminist or LGBT+ demands (Xiomara Castro in Honduras is still a bit of a blank page).
By bringing new issues to the table and consistently denouncing dictatorships in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, Boric has shown himself to be in a tradition of progressive rather than authoritarian leaders in the region. Whatever my qualms with his economic programme and his alliance with the Communist Party (another blogpost will follow), Boric represents a new left in a region where the old-guard lost legitimacy long ago. This should be celebrated, even by the right: all healthy political party systems flourish when there are reasonable programmatic distinctions on offer. The institutionalization of the Broad Front helps crowd out the possibility of a radical Hugo Chávez-style outsider coming to power.
It’s hard to know how much the Broad Front will influence politics in the region. The fact that Boric and his allies can put so much weight on post-material, identity-based issues is a reflection of Chile’s prosperity, which is far greater than that of its neighbours. But their triumph can breathe new air into the symbolic and discursive repertoire of the Latin American left, which has become stuck in the Cold War.
The centrist leaders who governed Chile for the past 30 years made the country one of the most prosperous and stable in Latin America, but they lost touch with their grassroots. Their rule is now ending. In 2017 Michelle Bachelet called the generation of youngsters in the Broad Front “the children of the Concertación” because many of its leaders are quite literally the offspring of centrist politicians. Chile’s future will depend on whether those children, now grown up, can handle the country’s transition after 2019 as successfully as their parents did in 1990. They will have to balance economic growth while responding to increased social demands. If they pull it off, they will have done a service not just to their country, but to the region as a whole.
