Commentary
The Chilean path to socialist suicide
Jara’s strategy, centered entirely on the need to “stop the extreme right” and “win in order to not go backward” while simultaneously reassuring the ruling class, was weak from the start.
In Chile, everyone is sure of it: everything was effectively decided already in the first round on November 16, and the runoff taking place on Sunday is little more than a formality. According to the latest polls, José Antonio Kast – the pinochetista (and son of a Nazi) who does nothing to hide it – has a lead of about 20 points over Jeannette Jara, the communist who does everything to avoid being seen as such. The gap is so wide that the right is already celebrating victory without the slightest worry of counting chickens before they hatch.
Jara, the candidate of Unidad por Chile, has spared no effort in attempting to convince the undecided – and above all the more than 2.5 million voters (almost 20% of the total) who voted in the first round for the populist Franco Parisi, who decided not to endorse either candidate. She did this mainly by leveraging the anti-Kast sentiment of various sectors of the country, launching attacks particularly on the threat to human rights and his promised budget cuts of $6 billion over 18 months.
During the heated presidential debate on December 3, people did notice that Kast gave a non-answer when asked by Jara which programs would be hit by these cuts. He found it easier to focus on threatening to deport the 336,000 irregular migrants residing in Chile – unless they leave the country “voluntarily” before his inauguration – and proposing a constitutional reform to strip Chilean nationality from their children born in the country.
Jara’s strategy, however, centered entirely on the need to “stop the extreme right” and “win in order to not go backward” while simultaneously reassuring the ruling class, was weak from the start. Nor did her meeting with U.S. Ambassador to Chile Brandon Judd do her any favors. Judd had made the news for openly saying in mid-November – just 11 days after assuming his post – that it was “easier to work” with a government ideologically aligned with the Trump administration (not to mention a government that would have a lot to offer the U.S., starting with lithium, which the country is notoriously rich in), while also expressing “disappointment” at Boric’s criticisms of Trump’s environmental policies.
Jara’s only chance would have been to present a proposal for real transformation, capable of reigniting the hope that arose with the estallido social (social outbreak) six years ago and ended up stifled by the subsequent four years of the Boric government. That administration was a deeply disappointing re-edition of the pact of governability – maintaining the status quo – forged by the two extreme sides of the same ruling class, manifested in 16 years of the alternation in power of Bachelet and Piñera. This was before the 2019 revolt which aimed to sweep away the economic and political model inherited from the Pinochet dictatorship.
It was thanks to the hundreds of thousands of citizens who poured into the streets in the face of brutal repression that Gabriel Boric was able to conquer the presidency, and with a strong mandate at that. He had a single, well-defined task: to transform the people’s demands into reality, liquidating once and for all the legacy of Pinochet.
It was a unique opportunity, and Boric wasted it miserably, incapable of offering anything but an almost complete economic continuity with the usual model; the same repression of social protests (only more selective); criminalization – even more extensive than before, if possible – of the Mapuche people; and the abandonment of any promise of structural transformation.
The result of this failure translates into a figure that says it all: in the first round, the Pinochetist extreme right, spread across its three candidacies – Kast, Johannes Kaiser and Evelyn Matthei – took 50% of the votes: not only ensuring victory in the presidential election but, as highlighted by one of the center-left candidates, Marco Enríquez-Ominami, reconquering “the political imagination of Chile.” And what is worse, he added, is that it did not do so on its own merits, but due to the “total collapse of the reformist camp”; not through offering any new solutions, but simply by wielding the weapon of the “instrumentalization of fear,” promising order, control and an iron fist.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/la-via-cilena-al-suicidio-del-socialismo on 2025-12-14