In this interview, writer and philosopher Daniel Tutt speaks with Gabriel Delacoste, a Uruguay-based political scientist and journalist, about the recent defeat of the Chilean left, with a focus on the lessons and warnings it holds for the international socialist movement. Delacoste offers a historically grounded and critical account of the developments that enabled José Antonio Kast’s far-right government to rise to power following the failure of Gabriel Boric’s administration. The meaning of this defeat remains contested and poorly understood; as Delacoste argues, the left has yet to undertake a sufficiently rigorous and honest reckoning with the failures of the Boric government.

The interview approaches these questions as a collective learning process for the left, connecting the lessons from Chile to broader problems facing the radical left and socialists: How can the left effectively convert a protest and hegemonic politics into a serious political project capable of wielding power? Can the left forge a politics that builds the trust of the working class, while remaining committed to its principles? What is the role of the ideological commitments of leaders, in particular left liberal ideology, as Boric embraces, in comparison to socialist ideological commitments? How do these commitments shape leftist politics in the age of neoliberalism? Delacoste brilliantly examines what went wrong in Chile, what can be learned, and what those lessons demand of future socialist movements.

Before discussing Gabriel Boric’s presidency, how should we situate the Chilean left within the broader history of Latin American socialism? What distinguishes its political traditions, social base, and relationship to liberal democracy from those of other left-wing movements in the region?

Maybe we should start with a bit of history. Before the Spanish conquest, the northern half of Chile was under Inca influence, and the center-south was the territory of the Mapuche people, who the Spanish called “Araucanos”. Because of its geographic isolation, Chile was not part of the great Spanish Viceroyalties but was ruled by a military authority called the “Capitain general”. This was mainly because of the fierce indigenous resistance that continued well into the 19th century and, in a way, up until today. Chile has a long oligarchic and military tradition as well as one of resistance to it.

Towards the second half of the 19th century, a liberal progressive elite started to form, along with the idea of making Chile into a progressive republic. Gradually, a salaried working class started to form around mining, and with it came leftwing parties and movements, which had fertile soil to grow in a rapidly urbanizing country. So big was the left that a Popular Front won the elections in 1938. A young Salvador Allende was a minister in that government. A very stable political system formed around liberal democratic institutions, which was called “the Chile of the three thirds”, formed by a conservative right, a Christian Democrat center and the socialist left. The importance of the reformist center should not be underestimated. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Santiago housed the headquarters of ECLAC, a central node for the creation of Latin American developmentalism, which was encouraged by the United Nations and the Kennedy administration. It was under a Christian Democratic government in the early sixties that the debates on nationalization and land reform started.

The left didn't return to power until 1970, when Allende led the Popular Unity (which included the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, and various liberal, Christian, and far-left groups) to victory. The fact that Allende was an old politician who won elections in a liberal democracy should not lead us to think that he was a moderate. This was a radical reformist project which included nationalizations, workers’ control and the introduction of a planned economy. The idea was to create a workers’ democracy inside a democratic republic, in open polemic with both the Cuban-inspired theory of the foco and Argentinian Peronism. This process was abruptly cut short by the US-backed coup led by Gen. Pinochet. This long and bloody dictatorship not only repressed the left but also put in place an ambitious plan for a profound authoritarian and neoliberal reform. The crown jewel of this project was a constitution that locked in a privatized and marketized education and social security, seriously limited union activity, and created an electoral system that made it very difficult to pass reforms through parliament. It also set up a Constitutional Court that could strike down reforms if they got through and great privileges were granted to the armed forces. The other dictatorships in South America didn’t come close to this kind of near-total neoliberal success.

It is crucial to understand that the return to liberal democracy in 1989 was under this constitution, and during the neoliberal hegemony of the nineties. In this context, a coalition between the Socialists and the Christian Democrats (which explicitly excluded the Communists) called Concertación was born. This coalition governed Chile from 1989 to 2010, with great success. If we look at it in its own terms, we see that the economy grew, inflation was low, and Chile signed dozens of trade agreements. A service-sector economy thrived, achieving an impressive expansion of university education. Chile was touted as the case of a center-left that was able to navigate globalization with a modernizing project that delivered a steady increase in incomes, like what was called “Third Way” in the North. But this was built on the premise of not touching the neoliberal institutional framework that produced great inequality, territorial segregation, and indebtedness. After 2010, the center-left alternated government with a right-wing coalition led by Sebastián Piñera, a billionaire who ran as a moderate and adhered to a brand of neoliberal reformism that aimed to continue with the essential architecture of the post-Pinochet regime.

What were the deeper social and political conditions that produced the Chilean uprising of 2019? Which classes and social strata participated in it, and did those groups share a coherent political project—or primarily a common rejection of the existing order?

The uprising was received by the elites as a great surprise, a shock. It was called “el estallido” (the explosion). Cecilia Morel, Piñera’s wife, called it an “alien invasion”. How could this happen in the country that is a supposed poster child of liberal stability? A deep anger was brewing for a long time and was blocked from finding a representation in the political system. The new social movements became illegible to the old elites: the people no longer wanted the “success” narratives that the elites had sold. The story of the transition to democracy was being questioned, and with it so too was the legitimacy of the elites on both the right and the center-left… especially the conformism of the old center-left.

Even though the revolt was identified with the left, one should not be very fast in judging what that means. One should think, paraphrasing Paolo Virno, on the ambivalence of the multitude. The revolt was started by high school girls who jumped through subway turnstiles, protesting a rate hike, but this seemingly small act happened on a near fifteen-year accumulation of student militancy. That the students were the nucleus of this movement says a lot. Students are not a class. In student politics, we can see aspiration to social mobility, anxiety over debt, intellectual currents that usually don’t leave the walls of academia, and generational politics.

Feminist demands formed a big part of those crowds, as well as territorial organizations from the peripheries, and a sizable anarchist movement. The Primera Línea (frontline) was a very tough self-defense group that specialized in clashing with the police and protecting the multitude, similar but not identical to Black Blocks in other contexts. Protests were dotted with modified Chilean flags (sometimes put upside-down, sometimes painted black) as well as Mapuche flags, protesting against the colonial nature of the Chilean state. A whole new revolutionary iconography was born, mixed with globalized popular culture: images and costumes from Pokémon, Dragon Ball Z and local muppet TV show 31 Minutes were common.

The left was certainly there, including its parties and youth branches. Socialists seemed to have re-discovered a more strident anti-neoliberalism. Demands for a free education and public social security were loudly heard. But it was the demand for a new constitution, an old slogan of the radical left, that started to be seen as a widely shared goal. One could say, with Laclau, that repealing Pinochet’s constitution and creating a new one became a hegemonic empty signifier.

Of course, something always gets lost in translation when a revolt is represented by a slogan. Especially in this case: intellectual vanguards associated with the revolt were profoundly anti-hegemonic and especially anti-Leninist. This has to do with a very important autonomist current in Latin American intellectual circles that grew from the critique of progressive and populist “pink tide” governments: feminism, decolonialism, environmentalism and indigenism were its main concerns. This was a Marx-friendly but not necessarily socialist current, inspired in part by thinkers like John Holloway and Raquel Gutiérrez. One can say that the “traditional” left and autonomist “post-modern” intellectuals fought over the interpretations of the revolt, which had a huge popular element (we are talking millions of people on the street) that cannot be reduced to any of those poles and mostly talked in terms of dignity. Revolutions are messy, especially in a deeply neoliberalized society, where institutions that mediate social and political life are extremely weak.

The Chilean state, headed by Piñera, completely lost control of the situation. Repression was futile, even though there were scores of injured and imprisoned protestors (some of whom continue to be in jail). Rumors of a coup d’etat circulated. Piñera made a last-ditch effort to arrive at a political pact that could defuse the situation. The left refused, but Gabriel Boric, a young lawmaker identified with the student movement, signed the pact against the will of his party. Many saw this as a betrayal. But it opened a new moment, with an established calendar that would end with a completely new constitution. Protests continued, but their intensity was reduced by the summer break and came to an end with the pandemic lockdowns.

It is not exaggerated to call this a revolutionary sequence. The people take to the streets, repression is defeated, and a Constituent Assembly is established: a textbook revolution. But, crucially, Piñera didn’t fall and was able to finish his term peacefully. Maybe this was an act of self-preservation of a people that couldn’t endure a coup d’etat. Maybe it was respect for democratic institutions. Maybe it was a lack of Leninist resolve. Maybe it was because of Boric’s betrayal. Maybe if it weren’t for the pandemic, the movement would have re-emerged in 2020. We’ll never know.

But we know one thing. The ghost of Allende walked with those crowds. “Se abrirán las grandes alamedas por donde pase el hombre libre para construir una sociedad mejor" (“A great path will be opened for the free man to build a better society”), a famous line from Allende’s last speech, was on countless banners. Videos from that time are electrifying and will always be a part of Latin American revolutionary imagination.

Boric’s path to the presidency ran from the student movement through the Frente Amplio, a primary victory over Communist Party candidate Daniel Jadue, and finally a runoff victory over José Antonio Kast. What coalition made that ascent possible, and what contradictions were already present within it?

Frente Amplio can be understood as a child of the long-term crisis of representation of the Chilean political system after 2010. Unable to win by itself and perceiving something was going on, the center-left Concertación coalition included the Communist Party for the 2013 elections. In those same elections, three student leaders were elected as lawmakers: Camila Vallejo from the Communist Party, Giorgio Jackson from a small progressive party Revolución Democrática and Gabriel Boric as an independent. They formed the so-called “student cacus”.

The student movement was steadily gaining momentum since the “Penguin Revolution” (high school students are jokingly called penguins because of their uniforms) of 2006, with successive peaks in 2011, 2012, 2015 and of course the 2019 uprising. This movement was very broad and creative and, crucially, highly combative: it had great training in fighting off the very aggressive Chilean police. Its struggle for free education was highly prestigious and that’s why its leaders immediately became nationally known figures. There was a great deal of generational politics at play. These were the children of the Concertación who could finally retire the old ruling class and break the unpopular neoliberal consensus.

Frente Amplio was born as a coalition of more than twenty progressive, environmentalist, pirate and left-libertarian groups (neither the Socialist nor the Communist Party were part of it). In 2017, it ran a TV host as a presidential candidate and achieved a respectable 20% of the vote. Its base was not unionized workers, but the youth and urban university-educated people (some would say “middle class”, but we are mainly talking about an upper salaried strata). Its platform was not revolutionary (the fact that it took its name from the very moderate Uruguayan Frente Amplio was a wink to Center-Left voters), but was certainly radical by Chilean standards. Boric was part of the Autonomist Party, situated at the far left of this coalition (it counted Italian operaismo and Mexican Zapatismo as inspirations) but was always regarded as a charismatic leader with an independent bent.

For the Constitutional Convention and the 2022 presidential elections, Frente Amplio unified as a single party and entered a coalition with the Communist Party called Apruebo Dignidad (“Apruebo” means “I approve”, the formula used to vote for the new constitution; and “Dignidad”, dignity, was a key word for the 2019 uprising). It is as part of this coalition that Boric beat Jadue (a popular mayor from a working-class neighborhood) and was later elected president.

How would you define Boric’s conception of the left? To what extent was his politics shaped by a specifically generational experience, forged in student mobilization, feminism, environmentalism, and human-rights politics? How does this version of socialism differ from the socialism of Salvador Allende or the Communist traditions of Latin America? And what do you see as its future in Chile and the region?

Boric is a progressive Left-liberal. He won the 2022 primary by tying the Communist candidate to Cuba and Venezuela and criticizing those countries’ Human Rights record. This can be understood as part of the Chilean left tradition of taking democracy and Human Rights very seriously after the brutal Pinochet dictatorship, but it can also be read as an anti-communist dog whistle.

It is possible to say that Boric started as a radical and then turned to the center, but if we understand what kind of radical he was this becomes less clear. He came from a radically pluralist left-libertarian intellectual milieu that fiercely criticized neoliberalism and the party system, but that didn’t necessarily have roots in the socialist tradition. He had tattoos and a mohawk but had not necessarily spent hours studying how to transition to a planned economy.

The milieu where he came from was strongly horizontalist, and one of his preferred phrases was “I want to leave the presidency less powerful than I entered”. But, at the same time, he is a very skilled politician, who was initially able to take advantage of the structurelessness of radical groups to gain autonomy as a leader. The difference with Allende should be clear by now. However, in the last decades, Allende’s name stood for the possibility of overcoming the limitations of the post-Pinochet regime. For a brief time, it seemed that Boric was doing just that.

The 2022 constitutional proposal was rejected decisively, despite emerging from demands associated with the popular revolt. What class dynamics explain that defeat? Which sectors moved from supporting constitutional change in 2020 to rejecting the proposed constitution two years later, and why?

The constitutional process calendar was set by the pact put forward by Piñera. It was very long and complicated. One could say it was a kind of trap. It started with a first referendum that asked if the process should start at all. It was held in October 2020 and was approved with 78% of the vote. The three richest neighborhoods of Santiago where the “reject” option won were isolated. In May 2021, a new election was held to choose the Constituent Convention. In this election, Apruebo Dignidad (the coalition of Frente Amplio and the Communist Party) got 19% of the vote, the center-left got 14%, and various independent lists and candidates that ranged from the populist center to the far left got more than 40% of the vote. The united right got 20% of the vote, very far from the third needed to have a veto power. In two consecutive elections, positions associated with the left got close to 80% of the vote. A new long-term hegemony seemed to be forming.

After the project for a new constitution was completed, a second referendum was held. But this time the result was the opposite: 62% of voters rejected the new constitution. How is this possible? Let’s go step by step.

An important detail was that between the election of the Constituent Convention and the final referendum, the presidential election happened. Both candidates who got to the second round were part of parties that didn’t exist five years earlier. On the left there was Boric, but on the right there was José Antonio Kast, a Pinochet admirer. The result was somewhat close, with Kast getting 44% of the vote. Very quickly, the country that voted overwhelmingly to the Left had vanished. Reformist consensus was replaced with polarization. The anti-political element that was fueling the representation crisis could swing right.

There was clearly a shift in the class composition of those that voted to approve the constitution from the first to the second referendum. Some working-class and rural voters were lost. But the most important component of this shift was in the design of the constituent process. In the first referendum and the election to the Convention, the vote was voluntary (as usual in Chile), but in the final referendum it was mandatory. Turnout jumped from 50% to 86%. Millions of people who didn’t usually vote did this time. And they voted overwhelmingly against the new Constitution. These new voters were mostly poor and working-class.

How much of the constitutional defeat resulted from errors within the Convention and the left, and how much resulted from the right’s political and media campaign? In particular, how did anxieties concerning crime, migration, public order, and national identity reshape the terrain on which the referendum was fought?

Even though by 2022 the growth of the far right had already started, it was still far from being a majority. If one looks at the TV ads for the “reject” option, they were not necessarily conservative. They criticized the text of the new Constitution, and did so invoking values close to the uprising: social justice, human rights, etc. The public conversation was still dominated by the left. During the campaign, some groups from the center-left broke ranks and spoke out against the project, with great repercussions. This was the criticism that had the most negative impact. Crime and migration were not on the agenda at that time. One could say that agenda did not cause the defeat but emerged because of the defeat.

Importantly, there were some notorious scandals that shook the prestige of the Convention. One constituent, who was a protester who got famous by saying that he was sick and couldn’t afford the medical bills, turned out to be a fraud. There were many inexperienced radicals in the assembly who used it as a tribune for performative acts and ideological speeches that sounded strange to the public. It was difficult to switch from protesting to understanding that they had won and now were responsible for the future of the country. Also, there were many difficulties in the negotiations, and broad pacts had to be worked out (the needed majority to pass articles was 2/3). The old center-left had veto power and used it to water down some important reforms. This gave the impression that politics as usual had returned, and the new elite were just as the old elites.

A very important issue was what one might call the national question. The indigenous movement was a crucial part of the coalition for the new constitution. The formula for addressing this was to create a plurinational state, as Bolivia had done a decade before. The problem is that the majority of Chileans, even though they are mestizos (with mixed Spanish and Indigenous heritage), don’t identify as indigenous. So the question is: What are the nations of the plurinational Chile? Aren’t Chileans a nation? Isn’t Chile a nation-state? If we add this to the interventions of the national flag that were commonplace during the uprising, we can understand how a nationalist sensibility was mobilized against the constitution. One can read this as a proto-reactionary sensibility, but I would add it to the many ambiguities of the process.

If one reads the first pages of the projected Constitution, women and the indigenous peoples are mentioned many times. Education and social security are not. Even though the text guaranteed expansive social rights, it gave the impression that it was all about identity politics and had abandoned the issues that mattered to most people. This was an important part of the conversation during the campaign. And on top of that, the new constitution included deep reforms to the political and judicial system, which generated uneasiness in people that could have supported some reforms but were afraid of instability. Of course, these are not necessarily mistakes but political and ideological choices which expressed the relation of forces in the emergent intellectual and political vanguards of the time.

Boric’s government tied much of its transformative agenda to the success of a constitutional process that it did not control. In retrospect, was this a strategic mistake? Could the government have pursued material reforms more independently of the constitutional question?

No. The name of the coalition that took Boric to the presidency made a direct reference to the approval of the new Constitution. The result of that process was always going to define his presidency. This is not only because of political or narrative reasons but because deep reforms are basically impossible under the Pinochet constitution. I would also dispute that he couldn’t control the process. There was plenty of politics going on in the Convention, and his allies were the most important players there. But it failed. And once the constitution was lost, Boric’s was just one more center-left government within the old system.

Boric’s government raised the minimum wage, began reducing the working week to 40 hours, passed pension reform, and expanded housing construction. Yet Boric has also acknowledged that it did not transform everyday conditions—particularly housing—as deeply as intended. Why did these reforms fail to produce a stronger sense of material transformation among working-class Chileans? Where do you locate the principal limits encountered by Boric’s government?

There were, of course, some reforms and improvements for the majority of the people. This was, after all, a leftist government. But it was very little compared with the expectation that it inspired. After the Constitution was lost, there was a second attempt at reform that also failed. Boric then had to enter a coalition with the old center-left to pass anything through the legislature, which further solidified the image that politics as usual had returned. There was no change in the political economy of Chile, and some ambitious projects, like the nationalization of lithium, didn’t actually materialize.

How would you situate this Chilean process in the context of other movements like the 2013 Brazilian protests, the “Movement of the Squares”, Syriza, Podemos, Sanders and Corbyn? Should we group it with these or with the previous South American “Pink Tide”?

The rhythm of Chile’s history is a bit different from the rest of South America. They had center-left governments in the 90s, when more other countries had right-wing governments. When most countries had anti-neoliberal movements at the start of the XXI Century, Chile enjoyed growth and stability. In 2010, at the peak of the popularity of Chávez, Evo Morales, Lula, Correa, Pepe Mujica, and Cristina Kirchner, in Chile the right won its first election in 25 years.

Chile’s process is more parallel to the post-2008 movements of the squares in North Africa, Europe and the US. It should be thought of along with the 2013 Brazilian protests, which also included fights over public transportation, black blocks and a violent shift from the far left to the far right. Syriza and Corbyn’s Labour also have some similarities with the Chilean process. After all, the problem was the same: How to break the control of the liberal center over the left. All these experiences failed, but they got farther than most other countries, so one has to respect what they contributed to opening the way for the discussions we are having now.

The far right has won the last election. How deep is the backlash against the Left and the legacy of the 2019 uprising?

It is very deep. The uprising and the constituent process are remembered with cynicism, sadness, and anger. Broken dreams are painful, and nobody wants to be seen as naive. People openly mock “October-ism” (the uprising was in October 2019), and the Kast government is, in a way, a direct rebuke of all that the uprising represented. Not only was the Pinochet constitution not repealed, now a Pinochetist is in government. One could say that the ascent of the far right was able to surf the same wave of anger and discontent that the left surfed five years ago. It was said many times that fascism emerges out of failed revolutions. This seems to be what happened.

How can the Chilean left rebuild a durable working-class constituency capable of uniting heterogeneous social classes, the indigenous, etc. without abandoning a transformative socialist program?

It’s too early to answer that question. It’s difficult to envisage a new opportunity like the one that was missed. The fact that the Communist Party candidate won the 2025 primary may be a good sign. But we don’t know how deep the damage of the Kast presidency will be, if he’ll be able to stabilize a conservative hegemony or will too be a victim of popular discontent.

A big controversy raged in the Latin American left in the last couple of decades between centrists, populists and autonomists. Every one of them failed, which is good in the sense that we can now talk as equals in failure. Radicals like to tell stories where they are perfect and only lose because they are betrayed. But very radical people and movements were very powerful for some periods in some countries. So we have to learn from this. In order to have a working-class socialist politics, we should start by clarifying what we mean by “socialist” and “working class” in this context. This may sound like an intellectualist alibi, but it’s not. We have to start from the beginning.

The political economy, the sociology, and the culture of the contemporary Latin American working class create a kind of fragmentation that is very difficult to unite politically. The three main fractions of the working class (the cognitariat, the unionized worker and the marginalized poor) tend to have different ways of organizing and have somewhat different interests. But we should reject the (racist and sexist) idea that racial and gender difference make it impossible to create broad alliances. I think that some new kind of universalist egalitarianism could have a place for everyone. Identity politics, however, happens for a reason that has deep roots in social and cultural fragmentation. It will take a lot of work to build a universalism that won’t be accused of being patriarchal, colonial, middle-class, etc.

Also, it’s not obvious what a viable socialist project would look like. The task of this moment is to ruminate on this question, while we navigate very complex conjunctures. Latin American countries that had left governments weren’t able to escape their positions of sellers of commodities for the world market. Could a new socialist project that combined ecology and cybernetics take hold in peripheral countries? Or are we condemned to populism, incomplete processes and revolutions that get destroyed by imperialism? We’ll have to answer that question the next chance we get, while at the same time doing everyday politics in a hostile environment.

If the Chilean Revolution had succeeded, maybe we would have a different political map in South America today. But we don’t. Looking at the whole process, one could say that there was an excess of horizontalism, that postmodernism ruined everything, that more Leninism would have been good. Maybe. But it couldn’t have been different, because the previous decades in Chile didn’t create a Leninist vanguard, but a “postmodern” one. And there were also problematic “verticalist” elements in the process. Rodrigo Nunes’ idea of “neither vertical nor horizontal” is very relevant to think about this.

Chile was a great hope, but it’s not for nothing that Spinozists say that hope is a sad passion. Illusions are beautiful, but they are not real. Potentials that don’t actualize leave one asking if they were potentials at all. It is not obvious what it would mean to be faithful to the Event of October 2019. Maybe the leftist interpretation of the uprising was wrong all along. One can identify some mistakes, but one cannot ask of historic forces to be something different from what they were.

Walter Benjamin said that there was a secret pact between generations, and that the defeated of the past were waiting to be redeemed. Allende and many other revolutionaries of the past are still waiting for us.