Human Rights Workshop: “What’s Left of the Left? Chile’s Constitutional Experiment and the Rise of Kast”

Chile’s recent political trajectory reflects both the endurance of democratic institutions and the volatility of popular frustration, explained Dan Israel ’23 LLM in a Human Rights Workshop hosted by the Orville H. Schell Jr. Center for International Human Rights on Feb. 19. The discussion traced Chile’s path from dictatorship to constitutional experimentation and, most recently, to the election of a right-wing president who has defended the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. 

Israel challenged U.S. narratives that reduce Chile to the story of dictatorship under Pinochet. While the 1973–1989 military regime remains central to Chile’s history, the country also experienced three decades of constitutional democracy afterward, often referred to as “los 30 años.” During this period, state narratives emphasized stability and economic growth. But those accounts, Israel noted, frequently masked persistent inequalities and structural inefficiencies that would later fuel dissatisfaction among Chileans. 

In October 2019, large-scale grassroots protests, known as the estallido social, erupted across the country. Demonstrators called attention to economic precarity, indigenous rights, environmental protections, and systemic inequality. The protests triggered a series of constitutional reform efforts between 2019 and 2023, including multiple referenda aimed at replacing Chile’s Pinochet-era constitution. 

Gabriel Boric, then a rising political figure on the left, supported a negotiated path to constitutional amendment, aligning with more centrist and right-leaning parties to move the reform process forward. That decision drew suspicion from factions within his own coalition, who viewed it as a capitulation that diluted the transformative potential of the protest movement. Rather than allowing the protests to drive a more sweeping leftist shift, Boric opted for institutional compromise—a strategy that would shape both the constitutional process and his presidency.

 In 2021, Boric faced off against José Antonio Kast in a presidential runoff that many framed as a stark ideological contest between left and right. Kast, a longtime admirer of the Pinochet dictatorship who participated in pro-regime advertising in his youth, represented a strand of Chilean conservatism previously thought to have limited electoral viability. Although Boric ultimately prevailed in that election, the political landscape remained deeply polarized. In 2022, 62 percent of voters rejected the proposed new constitution. The draft text’s reputation as an amalgam of legislative-style provisions with insufficient compromise or simplification meant that “most Chileans had a reason not to support the new constitution,” Israel explained. The defeat revealed the fragmentation and potential overreach of the reform coalition. 

Boric’s subsequent efforts to advance social reform met mixed results. A pension reform passed in March 2025 increased benefits for many Chileans but stopped short of fundamentally restructuring the country’s heavily privatized system or substantially reducing the role of private fund managers. Israel characterized the reform as a contradiction between the Boric administration’s early commitment to fundamentally restructure the pension system and the incremental policy it ultimately passed. 

In December 2025, Kast won the presidency, breaking what many had perceived as a ceiling on the electoral viability of politicians openly supportive of the dictatorship. Observers have expressed concern about indications that he may seek to reduce the role of political parties within government, raising questions about potential “strongman” ambitions. Still, Israel cautioned against overly simplistic historical analogies. It may be tempting to cast Boric as a contemporary Salvador Allende and Kast as a modern Pinochet. But “Chile today is not Chile in 1973,” Israel emphasized. Robust democratic institutions, constitutional procedures, and entrenched norms constrain executive power in ways that make an unchecked presidency unlikely. Both Boric and Kast, despite profound ideological differences, have operated within Chile’s existing institutional framework. 

The arc of Chile’s recent history, Israel concluded, illustrates both the fragility and resilience of democratic systems. Constitutional reform can serve as a vehicle for change, but it also demands political compromise and broad-based legitimacy. Chile’s experience underscores both the difficulty of translating protest energy into durable institutional reform and the enduring power of strong democratic processes and institutions to channel polarized political struggles.