Chile's presidential runoff next month is already being cast as a clash of extremes: on one side, Jeannette Jara, the leftist who joined the Communist Party at 14; on the other, Jose Antonio Kast, the ultraconservative, pro-life Catholic who promises a hard line against immigrants.
Fierce, right? From afar, it looks like just another manifestation of the toxic polarization gripping global politics. Except, it is not.
Behind the lazy labels for the two contenders facing off on Dec. 14 lies something remarkable: Chile's political system has matured enough to endure the feisty ideological battles of our time without tearing down its democratic institutions. In fact, Chile is offering the world a lesson in political civility.
Consider one of the debates among the eight candidates who competed in Sunday's election. The final one -- a three-hour-plus marathon -- brimmed with concrete proposals of all colors and civilized exchanges. During closing remarks, one candidate even paused to hand a rose to center-right contender Evelyn Matthei for her birthday amid rounds of applause.
Sure, you could find the usual populist pitches -- calls to send the military to the streets, pledges to drastically cut politicians' salaries and a hard-left representative arguing in favor of nationalizing copper and lithium production -- but even the campaign's scuffles felt unusually polite by Latin American standards. (Perhaps you missed the live debate last year in which a Sao Paulo mayoral candidate hit a rival with a chair). Unsurprisingly, Chile's sovereign spread -- a measure of country risk -- has remained mostly muted throughout the electoral cycle.
Why has Chile resisted the populist virus that has taken hold in the rest of Latin America and beyond? This is, after all, the country that just six years ago erupted in mass protests and public demands that challenged the Chilean system's very foundations, still resting on the neoliberal reforms of former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet dictatorship's years.
Amid deep political fragmentation, the 2019 Estallido Social brought to power a new generation led by millennial Chilean President Gabriel Boric -- at the time one of the world's youngest leaders -- who promised radical change. Yet that revolutionary fervor soon gave way to skepticism and pragmatism: Voters ultimately rejected two proposed constitutional overhauls, an overreaching left-leaning one in 2022 and another more conservative version in 2023.
As Chilean political analyst and consultant Kenneth Bunker convincingly argues in a new book, policymakers, strategists and experts alike widely misinterpreted the 2019 uprising -- "an elite misdiagnosis from the outset," he calls it.
The unrest reflected the system's inability to adapt to society's evolving demands, not a fundamental rejection of the economic and political model that made Chile a beacon of prosperity in Latin America, he said.
Chileans quickly recalibrated, rejecting ideological overreach and demands for total reform.
"We've tried the Latin American cure, it didn't work and now we've returned to normality," Bunker said. "Chile has a democratic memory that is respected. Its institutions and parties are strong and they play by the rules."
None of this means downplaying the serious challenges the next president would inherit. Insecurity, migration and corruption dominate Chileans' concerns, and these issues do not come with easy fixes. A striking 92 percent of Chileans say immigration is a major problem -- understandable when you consider that the share of foreign-born residents jumped to 8.8 percent last year, up from just 1.3 percent in 2002. The economy is also far from its booming years between late 1980s and early 2010s.
The proposals from Jara and Kast -- who advanced to the runoff yesterday with almost 27 percent and 24 percent of the vote respectively -- could hardly be more different: While Jara pledges to hike minimum income and expand Chile's welfare, Kast is vowing to cut corporate taxes, deploy the military to seal the border and deport thousands of undocumented.
It would be a mistake to see these contrasts as existential battles. Democracy's real strength lies in its ability to accommodate radically different viewpoints without burning down the house in the process. We already saw this in Chile between 2006 and 2022, when the leftist former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet alternated terms with the rightist former Chilean president Sebastian Pinera.
Given the current political climate, public demands and the Boric administration's poor approval ratings, Kast heads into the runoff with the upper hand. His victory would not only mark a major ideological shift for Chile, but also accelerate the region's rightward turn after Argentine President Javier Milei's decisive midterm win in Argentina and the collapse of 20 years of socialist rule in Bolivia. Washington would welcome more like-minded allies in what it now sees as its sphere of influence. Yet the results of Chile's election should be treated for what they are: the normal alternation of power in a functioning democracy following the changing demands of voters.
Nearly four years ago, in December 2021, Kast lost a similar runoff to Boric by almost 12 percentage points. I was in Santiago following the vote and, accustomed to the political antics common elsewhere in the region, I was struck by the losing candidate's gracious call to the president-elect hardly an hour after polls closed.
"He deserves all our respect and constructive collaboration," Kast said about Boric that night.
You might question Kast's sincerity, but that gesture alone makes the label "ultraconservative" feel reductive and misleading -- even if he does sit on the far end of the ideological spectrum. Conceding defeat with dignity is what democrats do. Crying fraud on flimsy grounds is what sore losers do -- and we are seeing far too much of that, from Brazil and Mexico to the US.
Which is why I expect that, once polls close next month, the losing candidate would once again concede and move on. Chile shows that a country can be polarized without compromising its democratic norms. That is something worth celebrating and imitating.