Chile Electoral Results — Jara and Kast Will Go to a Runoff
By Andres Cardenas Guzman (El Mostrador)
HAVANA TIMES – With the electoral map almost complete, the scenario is uphill for the ruling-party candidate: the right already gathers enough votes to prevail in the December 14 runoff, while potential centrist support appears insufficient to reverse the trend.
At this point it’s not about projections or intuitions: the numbers themselves dictate the script. With 97.91% of polling stations counted as of this edition’s close, Sunday’s votes ares practically sealed. Jeannette Jara stands at 26.83%, Jose Antonio Kast at 23.96%, Franco Parisi 19.65%, Johannes Kaiser 13.93%, Evelyn Matthei 12.51%, Marco Enriquez-Ominami 1.19%, Harold Mayne-Nicholls 1.26%, and Eduardo Artés 0.66%.
And here is the decisive part: the combined total of Kast, Kaiser, and Matthei already easily surpasses Jara. Both Kaiser and Matthei acknowledged Kast’s victory within minutes of the results being announced and called on their supporters to vote for him in the December runoff. In other words, the right-wing bloc is already aligned—and added up—without the need for public negotiations or suspense.
According to sociologist Pedro Güell, what is happening is simple: the election practically ended on the very day of the first round. Not because it is formally decided, but because the math has left Jara without a path to catch up. “What’s key now is understanding that there was a result that will likely project itself into the second round, that the right will have a fairly large sum of votes,” the academic from the Universidad Austral de Chile and key adviser to Michelle Bachelet’s government told El Mostrador.
The exercise is simple:
• Kast + Kaiser + Matthei = 50.4%.
• Jara + Parisi = 46.48%.
Of course, the above assumes an extremely optimistic scenario for the ruling-party candidate: that Parisi and his entire electorate would go to her, something that—historically and based on Parisi’s own discourse—does not seem likely. The more realistic scenario is that those votes will be split, dispersed, or even demobilized.
In simple numbers: even if Jara achieved a political miracle and captured 100% of the PDG vote, she would still lose.
Güell’s diagnosis is stark: the left has entered the runoff with a lethal combination of factors—its own underperformance, fragmentation, and little capacity to grow beyond its hard base—while the right has arrived with three strong, competitive candidates capable of transferring votes among themselves without deep fractures.
“The tensions within the ruling coalition will surface in the coming weeks. This is not necessarily bad. We must acknowledge those tensions and process them. It would be absurd to think that, just because we have a powerful adversary, we must unite for that reason alone. We are challenged; we have a big task ahead,” said Pedro Güell, considered Bachelet’s “whisperer.”
And that big task, according to the academic, is first “to undertake a critical review, but beyond thinking about how to be an opposition, the question is how we formulate again a development project capable of adequately and attractively addressing citizens’ demands.”
In that sense, he adds: “What lies ahead is not only the work of loyal and democratic opposition, but also a work of reflection and restoration, and especially of reconnection with our historical social bases and with the new bases we can build.”
The full picture is even tighter for Jara when analyzing the historical behavior of Kaiser’s and Matthei’s voters: more than 80% coincide with Kast in the second round. And now, with both calling for support for him, that vote transfer appears more orderly than ever.
For the ruling-party campaign, the only option left is to try to broaden its electorate with messages aimed at the center and calls for moderation. Jara already hinted at adopting some of the proposals from other candidates during her speech last night, but the magnitude of the challenge is almost arithmetic: she needs to add more votes than exist.
Pedro Güell says the big question is also who—or what group of leaders—will lead this rather challenging process going forward. In his view, “President Boric is in a relatively good position, in the sense that he has taken some distance from actors within his coalition and positioned himself above them, which allows him to act as an arbiter and mediator.” However, he reiterates, “just as we want to see gestures from the right, we must also see what gestures the President and other actors within the coalition will make.”
First published in Spanish by El Mostrador and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.