The decline of the traditional parties brings Chile closer to a change of cycle

For the first time in the history of Chilean democracy, none of the favorites in next Sunday’s presidential elections is part of the two traditional coalitions of the center-left and center-right that for more than 30 years shared power.

Although there is distrust towards the polls due to their mistakes in the last votes, almost all agree that the substitute for Sebastian Piñera It will be from a match with less than 5 years of history: Gabriel Boric, from the leftist Frente Amplio, or Jose Antonio Kast, of the far-right Republican Party.

It is less unlikely that Yasna Provoste, from the Nuevo Pacto Social bloc, or Sebastián Sichel, from Chile Podemos Más, the letters of the two great coalitions that shared power after the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) and known at the dawn of the transition as Concertación and Alianza.

For Claudia Heiss, head of the Political Science career at the University of Chile, it is about the “twilight” of these two great traditional formations that had already been dying for years.

“Its decline is the chronicle of an announced death,” he told Efe.

“Political remnant”

The rise of Boric and Kast in these elections, the most crucial and uncertain of the last decades, is a sign of the “collapse of traditional politics,” explained Kenneth Bunker, director of the Tresquintos pollster.

“Not being linked to traditional parties has given wings to these candidates,” he said.

For the expert, this “political shake-up” began with the new electoral system, which debuted in the 2017 elections and changed the logic from binomial to proportional.

This led to the emergence of new formations in Parliament: the Broad Front won 15 seats in Parliament and its presidential letter, Beatriz Sánchez, rose as the third favorite, with 20% support.

In those same elections, the current candidate Kast, often compared to the Brazilian Jair Bolsonaro, came in fourth place competing as an independent, with almost 8% support.

The effect of the social crisis

The decline of the traditional parties “ended up being consolidated with the so-called social outbreak of 2019,” a movement for equality that lasted for more than a year with massive marches, said Javier Sajuria, from the Queen Mary University of London.

“There, any remnants of legitimacy that the parties had ended up, and many voters were left orphans,” he explained.

In the constituent elections of last May, the main vote after the marches, this trend was evidenced: the independents ousted the heavyweights of politics and were the most voted force with 48 of the 155 seats to draft the new Constitution.

“Towards a more European model”

For María Cristina Escudero, from the University of Chile, it is “unlikely that this is the collapse of the traditional parties”, but rather a reconfiguration of the political map “towards a more European model where old and new formations coexist.”

One of them would be Kast’s Republican Party, founded in 2019 as a radical split from the most right-wing party of the ruling party, the Independent Democratic Union (UDI), and whose success is now attributed to the growing migration crisis and violence in the south. from the country.

On the other hand, there is the Broad Front, a formation that emerged in 2017 in a similar way to Podemos in Spain and that would govern in coalition with the Communist Party and other progressive groups.

The head of the School of Government at the University of San Sebastián, Jaime Abedrapo, pointed out that there is still nothing clear because these are “the most uncertain elections in democracy.”

The polls indicate that there is a large group of undecided despite the relevance of the elections, in which a president will be elected who will have to implement the norms of the new Constitution and lead a country immersed in a strong social crisis and pressing inflation after the pandemic.

No candidate would be able to prevail in the first round and they would have to be measured in the December 19 ballot, according to most polls.

“What is evident – concluded Abedrapo – is that the parties are at a crossroads: either they renew themselves by changing their façade, their sensibilities and their agenda, or they will continue to be the great burden for the country’s governance.”