Chile has held seven nationwide ballots in the six years since large-scale protests rocked the country’s political system in 2019: two rounds of the general election in 2021 and five votes related to two failed attempts to rewrite the country’s constitution. Counting the 2024 municipal elections, that will make the presidential and legislative elections scheduled for Nov. 16 and the second round of the presidential election on Dec. 14 the ninth and tenth times Chileans will have gone to the polls since the country so loudly demanded that its political system be changed. And yet, no clear direction for change has emerged, nor is one likely to this time.
The protests in October 2019 began with students jumping over subway turnstile gates in Santiago, the capital, to protest a minor increase in fares, prompting police to intervene and stop them. The escalation from there was surprisingly rapid. Within days, the protests had turned into massive, largely peaceful demonstrations across the country, though some violent and destructive protesters caused over $200 million of damage to property and other infrastructure. Police and military personnel used excessive force against peaceful protesters, at times aiming at their eyes to blind them. This angered a large majority of Chile’s population, driving even more people into the streets. At the peak of what was dubbed the estallido, or explosion, over 1 million Chileans—5 percent of the population of 20 million—joined the protests, and polling demonstrated that the majority of the country supported the movement.
The protests did not subside until then-President Sebastian Pinera agreed to hold a referendum over whether to rewrite the country’s constitution, which dated back to the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and was associated with that dark chapter of Chile’s past. In addition, the constitution was seen as codifying a system that, although it had delivered long-term macroeconomic stability, making Chile an outlier in the region, came at the cost of stark inequalities in wealth and opportunity.