Chileans headed to the polls last month in watershed general elections. For the first time since 1989, neither of the leading candidates hailed from the pro-market, center-left, and center-right coalitions that have dominated the state since redemocratization. Although a surging reactionary populist, José Antonio Kast, won a narrow plurality, the top contender he will face in this month’s second-round ballot embodies Chile’s emerging radical left. On a parallel track, delegates representing a broad array of the population’s interests, including long-disregarded poor and working masses, are rewriting the constitution.

While the country gears up for the runoffs and awaits the outcome of the constituent assembly, Chile today presents one of the most challenging and promising scenarios for the global left that all socialists should pay attention to. After decades of setbacks and decline — defeats many feared might be permanent — mass movements of workers and the poor launched a cycle of protest that culminated in a generalized rebellion in October 2019 that put the final nails in the coffin of the party system that managed and reinforced Chilean neoliberalism for thirty years. It won the demand for a new constitution to replace the authoritarian and pro-market charter inherited from the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. An overwhelming majority voted in favor of constituent elections. And when the time came to elect representatives to draft the new constitution, voters delivered a crushing blow to the diminished center-left and center-right ruling coalitions.

In an outcome that would have been near inconceivable just a few years ago, a new alliance of the longstanding Communist Party (CP) and the upstart left Frente Amplio (FA, Broad Front) won nearly one-fifth of votes, just shy of the billionaire president’s center-right coalition. The same Apruebo Dignidad coalition, headed by former student leader and key player in the country’s new left Gabriel Boric, steadily led presidential election polls until last month. Meanwhile a radical, movement-oriented, independent slate came away with about one-sixth of constituent election votes, outpolling the center-left alliance that dominated Chile’s postauthoritarian neoliberal order.