Elections can always bring surprises. But it is likely that the next president will be an ultra-right politician: José Antonio Kast. Although he was not surpassed by the candidate of the left-wing coalition Unity for Chile, he now has a better chance of growing, adding the votes of two other right-wing candidates, than his communist opponent Jeanette Jara.
Kast’s possible victory has been interpreted in two ways. The first predicts that it will seal a historic shift to the right in , anticipated by Bolsonaro’s election in 2018 and followed by the victories of , in , in 2023, of Daniel Noboa, in Ecuador, and of Rodrigo Paz, in Bolivia, both in 2025.
Thus, we would be facing a new political cycle in the region, similar — but with the opposite sign — to the long “pink wave” that in the first decades of the century multiplied moderate left governments.
The second way to see the Chilean ultra-rightist’s success is as a repeat of a pattern of behavior by a frustrated electorate. Called to vote, he systematically punishes the incumbent, preferring those who oppose him, on the right or on the left. In this way, if a wave exists, it has no political color; is against the current government, whatever its orientation.
In December we will know in which direction the political winds are blowing in Chile. But it will take much more time to confirm which of the two interpretations above holds.
But there is something that can already be said by going through the Chilean ballot boxes: this is an important metamorphosis in the political forces in dispute, if not in all of South America, at least in three of its most robust democracies. The change concerns, on the one hand, the loss of electoral importance of center parties; on the other, the rise, in the right-wing camp, of more extreme leaders and organizations.
In Chile, this phenomenon is expressed in the decline of the three centrist groups that formed the coalition responsible for organizing the transition from Pinochet tyranny to democracy and for alternating in the Palacio de la Moneda between 1990 and 2018: the Christian Democratic Party and the two parties of the moderate left — the Socialist Party (PS) and the Party for Democracy (PPD). And, above all, due to the dehydration of the traditional right and the fragmentation of the field that allowed the populist Kast to pass to the second round.
In Argentina, the long-standing Radical Civic Union, which led the opposition to Peronism and headed the first civilian government when democracy was restored in 1983, lost strength. She became a minor partner within center-right anti-Peronist coalitions. Finally, her candidate for the Casa Rosada in 2023 is now Javier Milei’s minister.
In Brazil, the story is known. It goes through the irresistible decline of the PSDB, the union of the right wing around Bolsonaro and the current fragmentation of conservative candidacies competing for the political spoils of the former coup president.
The relationship between the new South American ultra-right and representative democracy is still unknown. Bolsonaro tried to destroy it; Milei tries to bastardize her. In any case, the decline of the center and the strength of extreme populism portend difficult times.
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