Chile is currently experiencing a period of open political contestation. This is not merely an electoral shift to the right, but a deeper struggle over the meaning of the country. It is taking place in a context marked by the exhaustion of the neoliberal model, growing frustration with the expectations of change raised in recent years, and a realignment of political forces. Some of these have been more effective than others at interpreting the accumulated social discontent.
The social uprising of October 2019 was the clearest expression of this crisis. More than a million people took to the streets not only to denounce material living conditions but to question the very foundations of the social order built over recent decades. The demand for dignity, social rights, and structural justice was the opening for a period of mass politicisation that transcended institutional frameworks.
However, the momentum of this uprising did not consolidate into sustained structural transformation.
The data show that the underlying problem remains. According to the 2024 CASEN (National Socioeconomic Characterisation) Survey, a large proportion of households in Chile live on incomes that barely cover the cost of living. Wealth remains highly concentrated among higher-income sectors. This is compounded by high levels of household debt and a sustained increase in the cost of living, especially in housing, health, and education. Inequality not only persists but is experienced daily, producing a widespread sense of economic insecurity and social fragility.
Failing to deliver
In this context, the political cycle that brought progressivism to government generated strong expectations of transformation. Much of that hope was placed in the constitutional process initiated after the social uprising, which sought to replace the constitution inherited from the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. However, the constitutional process failed. Both progressive and reactionary drafts were successively rejected by popular votes. This left progressive and Left forces—both institutional and social—in a state of exhaustion and disorientation from which they have not yet fully recovered.
The government has operated within an inherited institutional framework, with limited room to push through structural change. It has experienced difficulties in passing significant reforms, including a key tax reform that would have raised tax revenue from the wealthy and redistributed it to fund social programmes. In a context of low economic growth, this has revealed the limits of the current political cycle.
But these limits cannot be explained only by institutional constraints. Social movements and critical sectors have argued that it wasn’t just that progressivism faced limits; on several occasions, it adapted to them. Instead of challenging the model, it chose to manage it; instead of expanding conflict as a driver of transformation, it tended to contain it. This shift weakened its ability to shape the dominant narrative and eroded its connection with the social forces that brought it to power.
One way to understand this process is through the distinction proposed by political scientist Pierre Ostiguy between “high” and “low” politics. Once in government, progressivism shifted towards a more institutional, technical, and moderate form of politics, oriented towards stability and governability. In this transition, it lost connection with the politics that emerge from everyday experience: direct language, emotional appeal, and identification with the concrete problems of the majority it claims to represent.
Enter the far right
But that space did not remain empty. While progressivism attempted to process conflict through gradual reforms and a constitutional process that ultimately failed, other actors moved more effectively in interpreting social discontent. The far right not only offered order but also a simple narrative in the face of uncertainty. At the same time, anti-political narratives managed to channel popular rejection into a rejection of traditional elites. Progressivism, on the other hand, became caught between its working-class origins and its institutional practice. It failed to articulate a narrative capable of connecting the two.
The grassroots see this gap very clearly. The transformative programme failed to produce sufficiently clear responses to urgent problems such as debt, insecurity, precarious work, and the high cost of living. And in politics, vacuums are filled: when one force fails to interpret discontent, another fills the space.
In this sense, the problem is also one of historical political vision. The Left failed to build a cultural hegemony capable of sustaining its transformations beyond the electoral cycle. The ideas that emerged strongly during the 2019 mobilisations did not become a dominant consensus. Without that social and cultural base, reforms remain exposed, fragile, and easily reversible.
This gap between expectations and results opened the way for a reconfiguration of the political field. The right—and especially its more radical expressions—has not only grown electorally; it has also advanced in the cultural struggle. It has managed to establish a dominant narrative centred on law and order, security, and control. This shifts the axis of debate from structural inequality to the management of social conflict.
At the same time, an anti-political current has strengthened, channelling rejection of the traditional political system. The emergence of movements and leaderships that present themselves as political outsiders reflects the existence of an electorate that is critical of institutions and receptive to anti-establishment discourse.
Social discontent, far from disappearing, has changed its form. In 2019, it was expressed mainly as a demand for social rights. Today it manifests as insecurity, distrust in the state, social fatigue, and fear in the face of economic uncertainty. The far right offers order; anti-politics offers disruption; and the transformative camp has yet to translate this discontent into a clear and compelling vision.
A new phase of organisation
The current situation does not represent the closing of the cycle that began in 2019, but a new phase of reorganisation. The structural conditions that gave rise to mobilisation remain. What is at stake today is how these tensions are politically organised and which forces succeed in giving them meaning.
For transformative forces, the challenge is profound. It is not enough to improve the management of the state. It is necessary to rebuild a social and cultural base capable of contesting the dominant narrative. This implies returning to grassroots work, listening beyond one’s own political circles, strengthening social organisation, and also contesting the digital space, where a central part of political life now happens.
Recent experience shows that winning elections is not enough if there is no active social base to sustain change. Without social organisation, transformations are weakened. Without a political project capable of building collective meaning, politics is reduced to administration.
The shift to the right is not an exclusively Chilean phenomenon. In different countries of Latin America, the exhaustion of progressive cycles has opened space for conservative and radical forces. In this context, Chile appears both as a warning and as a possibility: it shows the limits of projects that lose connection with everyday life, but it also shows the persistence of social conditions that can give rise to new processes of transformation.
What is at stake is not only who governs, but the very meaning of democracy and the future of the country.
Damaris Astete Marchant is a social worker and grassroots organiser. She is also the International Relations Spokesperson for Ukamau Chile. She has a diploma in grassroots development for Building Territories for Good Living and Cooperative Housing.
*Featured image by Juan Manuel Núñez Méndez on Unsplash
