Chile’s far right has won an emphatic victory in a vote to select the committee that will rewrite its dictatorship-era constitution, after José Antonio Kast’s Republican party secured 22 of its 50 seats in a major blow to the progressive president Gabriel Boric.
Boric beat Kast, an ultra-conservative lawyer often compared to Brazil’s former leader Jair Bolsonaro, in the 2021 presidential election.
But on Sunday night it was Kast who was celebrating after 35% of voters backed Republicanos, the extreme-right party he founded in 2019.
“This is an earthquake in Chilean politics,” the Chilean journalist Rocío Montes wrote in El País, noting how Chile’s left had secured only 17 places on the council, meaning it would be unable to veto rightwing changes. Another rightwing coalition won 11 seats.
Kast celebrated Sunday’s result as “a new start” for his South American country.
“Today, Chileans have defeated listlessness, apathy and indifference,” he said, claiming voters had sent a “loud and clear message” about the conservative direction they wanted Chile to take.
Moves to rewrite Chile’s Pinochet-era constitution began in 2020, when nearly 80% of citizens voted to revamp the charter following huge street protests and unrest the previous year. However, a progressive new draft was rejected by a clear majority last September, forcing politicians to return to the drawing board and for a new constitutional council to be elected.
Political scientist Robert Funk said Sunday’s results meant the next draft of Chile’s constitution was likely to be more rightwing.
He said: “It’s pretty bad news … Right now, it looks like we are going to have, in the best-case scenario very few changes to what we already have now and, in the worst-case scenario, actually a shift to the right.
“The Republicans could try to prohibit abortion in the constitution, for example. So we could actually end up with a constitution which on values issues is even more conservative than what we have now.”
If that happened, it was possible Chile’s left would boycott or actively campaign against the new draft and that voters might again reject it, as they did last year.
“That’s what worries me more than anything else because that just means a continuation of uncertainty and tension and polarization,” Funk said.
Kast’s victory cements his status as the dominant figure on Chile’s right, and is the latest reminder of the populist far right’s continued appeal across South America, despite Bolsonaro’s defeat in Brazil’s presidential election last October.
A far-right radical billed as “Paraguay’s Bolsonaro” came third in that country’s recent presidential election, with 23% of the vote. Paraguayo “Payo” Cubas was arrested on Friday after claiming, without evidence, that the election had been rigged.
In crisis-stricken Argentina, the far-right libertarian Javier Milei looks set to play a prominent role in October’s presidential election. Earlier this year, Milei and Bolsonaro vowed to fight together to prevent Latin America becoming “the Soviet Union” and for their supposedly shared values of “God, homeland, family and freedom”.
