By David Altman/Latinoamérica21
What did we see this Sunday? Beyond the result—conclusive and without appeal—the first thing is to recognize the functioning of the system: in just under two hours after the polls closed, the Electoral Service had already counted around 97% of the votes. At that point, the conservative José Antonio Kast exceeded 58.2%, with more than seven million votes. While some wrote on the networks “it’s over”, others ironically said “four years of Chastigo”. The main political actors, meanwhile, displayed republican behavior and an undoubted commitment to democracy.
But the true meaning of this election is in the emergence of a new cleavage that organized the vote. For the first time since the return to democracy, Chile has a president who voted for the Yeah in the 1988 plebiscite—to decide whether or not Pinochet remained in power—and who, in addition, actively participated in Pinochet’s campaign. Former President Piñera, let us remember, had voted No.
This fact, by itself, would have been unthinkable for decades, not because the right could not win – it had already done so – but because the dictatorship/anti-dictatorship cleavage functioned as a symbolic structuring limit. That limit, today, no longer organizes Chilean politics, as I argue in a recent investigation titled “Restoration vs. Refoundation: How the 2019–2023 cycle reconfigured the Chilean political conflict”.
The 2025 election not only marks a change of government; marks something deeper: the displacement of the axis that ordered political competition for more than 25 years. The territorial evidence is eloquent. The electoral map of this election is much more similar to the 2022 exit plebiscite from which the proposal for a new Constitution prepared by a majority progressive convention was rejected – and, to a lesser extent, to that of the 2023 constitutional text – than to any vote associated with the democratic transition. Communes that voted Reject in 2022 aligned themselves again in an almost identical way in 2025. On the other hand, the explanatory weight of the 1988 plebiscite is diluted when the recent cycle is incorporated.
This is not a metaphor or an impressionistic intuition: it is an observable territorial realignment. When elections are systematically compared from 1988 to today, the pattern is clear. The 2025 vote replicates almost point by point the geography of the 2022 plebiscite. The old democracy-dictatorship cleavage survives as a symbolic identity, but it has ceased to decisively structure the electoral competition.
What replaces it? A different axis, born from the cycle opened in 2019: restoration versus refoundation. This new axis is not defined by positions regarding the dictatorship, but by contrasting interpretations of the social outbreak, public order and the constituent process. For the restoration pole, the outbreak represented a breakdown in order, an erosion of the authority of the State and an institutional drift that must be corrected. For the refoundational pole, it was the legitimate expression of an accumulated malaise and evidence of an exhausted model that required profound transformations.
The presidential campaign showed this clearly. Both the right-wing opposition Kast and the left-wing official candidate Jara structured their diagnoses around the 2019–2023 cycle, not around the authoritarian past. The difference was in the emphasis: Kast spoke, above all, of “how” to achieve order—public security, control, state capacity—, while Jara focused on the “what” of transformation—social rights, role of the State. But none organized their narrative based on the dictatorship/democracy axis. Its virtual absence is as revealing as its former omnipresence.
This displacement is not limited to speeches. It is also seen in elite lineups. Figures historically associated with No since 1988 have supported candidacies located in the restoration pole. The most surprising case is that of former president Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle: son of a president assassinated by the dictatorship and symbol of the transition, today he supports positions that were unthinkable under the old cleavage. From comparative theory, this type of “crossing of the Rubicon” is a classic sign of structural weakening of a historical axis.
Some will say that this is just alternation, disapproval of the outgoing government or a punishment vote. But that explanation doesn’t fit the data. The alternation produces oscillations; It does not generate such high and persistent territorial correlations between elections of different types, nor does it simultaneously reorder the discourse of both blocks around the same interpretive cycle.
What we are seeing is something else: it is, possibly, a cleavage in formation. Not fully institutionalized, still without complete organizational anchoring, but already powerful enough to structure the vote, campaigns and elite strategies.
It is advisable to stop at one point. This axis does not describe closed government projects nor does it allow us to anticipate future democratic trajectories. Restoration and refoundation do not equate to moderation or radicalization, nor to more or less democracy. They are interpretive frameworks through which political actors and electorates process the cycle opened in 2019: different diagnoses about order, legitimacy and change. Confusing this axis with a normative evaluation of governments would be a mistake.
The reference to “30 years” clearly summarizes this new axis. In Chile, this expression became popular during the social outbreak of 2019 through the slogan “it’s not 30 pesos, it’s 30 years”, alluding not to the specific increase in public transportation, but to the three decades after the end of the dictatorship.
That cycle was marked by institutional stability, economic growth and gradual reforms, but also by persistent inequalities and a growing distance between citizens and elites. For some, the outbreak represented an unjustified disruption of an order that had produced substantive progress; For others, it was evidence of an exhausted model that required profound transformations. This difference is not anecdotal: it structures political competition today in a much more decisive way than the positions against the authoritarian regime of the past.
The 2025 election does not close this process. But it makes one thing clear: the dictatorship-democracy axis has ceased to be the central organizing principle of Chilean politics. The country is currently debating how to interpret and close—or deepen—the crisis that opened in 2019. Reading this scenario as a mere repetition of the cleavages of the transition, or as if we were still in 1988, is simply not understanding the nature of the current political tensions.
David Altman is a political scientist and professor of Political Science, Universidad Católica de Chile. Director V-Dem Regional Center for Latin America. Public Space Director.
