The Chilean extreme right has won a comfortable victory in the elections for constitutional councilors held this Sunday, in which the Republican Party, in favor of maintaining the current Constitution drafted during the dictatorship, has obtained 22 seats of the 50 that were at stakebecoming the party with the most votes and doubling the traditional right in seats.

“Today we can breathe a little easier,” said its leader, José Antonio Kast, who lost the 2021 presidential elections to the current president, gabriel boricand is a staunch defender of the neoliberal model established by the military dictatorship.

With 35.4% of votes, his candidacy has swept most of the 16 regions of Chile, in its traditional strongholds in the south, in the north and even in strongholds of the left such as the Valparaíso Region. These 22 seats will allow him to exercise the power of veto in the constitutional body.

The Republicans They have repeated the ‘sorpasso’ like this which they already gave in the 2021 elections, when they won the first presidential round and obtained 16 parliamentarians in the legislatures (15 deputies and one senator, although three of them left the party). However, now for the first time will lead the body in charge of discussing and approving a new Constitution.

Kast’s victory completely changes the balance of forces of the new Constitutional Council against the previous Convention, dominated by progressivism and a majority of independent candidates who, unlike in these elections, were able to run on their own lists.

During the campaign, the republicans lashed out with force against the rest of the oppositionalthough in recent days, Kast – who left the traditional right-wing coalition where he had been a member for more than 20 years because he considered it too moderate – gave signs of wanting to bet on a more dialogue style.

After the rejection of the first constitutional proposal in September and unlike the extreme right, the traditional right opted from the beginning to resume the constituent itinerary. Now, according to analysts, the conservative Chile Seguro coalition is weakened and at the crossroads of taking the extreme positions of the Republicans or adopting a more moderate profile of his own.

The deputy of the Independent Democratic Union (UDI), Juan Antonio Coloma, the main formation of the block, admitted that this is a “triumph of the opposition” led by the Republicans: “We are not going to make the mistakes of the left in the process previous”, has claimed.