During a televised debate last week, conservative presidential candidate Evelyn Matthei evoked an image of the Chilean everyday woman who longs for security, attempting to strike a chord with the electorate ahead of Chile’s general elections in November.
‘What I want is that Juanita will feel safe in her home, that she won’t feel scared when her child goes to school or when her partner comes home late … that she can love a pleasant country, like what we used to be,” she said.
The imagery was a rebuke of the current perceived security situation under outgoing leftist President Gabriel Boric, Chile’s youngest ever leader who campaigned on a platform to improve the lives of Chileans known as “para vivir mejor” (to live better).
As his term approaches its end, candidates like Matthei are scrutinizing Boric’s record on everything from security, to the economy, and his efforts to rewrite the country’s social contract. But what will become of the legacy of the world’s first millennial leftist president? Did he succeed in making life better for ordinary Chileans?
Preserving the status quo
Elected in December 2021, Boric, a former student leader, promised a radical restructuring of Chilean politics. His governing coalition attempted to replace Chile’s constitution with a document that, if approved, would have been the world’s most progressive charter. The draft was rejected by over 60% of voters. Following this failure, Boric’s Democratic Socialism project has largely failed to produce the sweeping change it promised.
“Chileans don’t feel better than they did four years ago,” said Robert Funk, a political analyst at GlobalSource Partners, a consultancy.
“Boric and his fellow student leaders said democratic governments had failed to change the status quo, that they still used the economic model of the dictatorship. Once in office, Boric was hit by the reality of governing. Few of his policies had any impact,” Funk added.
Ignacio Arana Araya, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, agrees.
“Boric is not leaving a remarkable legacy. Since Chile’s re-democratisation in 1990, his government has arguably enacted the fewest reforms and his government has ended up preserving much of the status quo.”
Learning to compromise
A cornerstone of Boric’s programme was to revamp the economic model to tackle inequality and poverty. And yet, this July, after remodelling the way poverty is measured in the country, the latest figures from the National Socioeconomic Characterization Survey suggest that over 22% of Chileans are living below the poverty line.
Funk described Boric’s economic legacy as “mediocre”. He said his biggest successes were lowering spending after the pandemic, increasing the minimum wage by 51% without impacting inflation and lowering the working week from 45 to 40 hours.
Despite the wage increases, Boric’s economic strategy has fallen short of his pledge to “bury” the neoliberalism that defined the Chilean economic model in the 1980s and beyond. His ambitious tax reform failed in Congress and was watered down; post-Covid fiscal constraints meant promises to revitalize social services, education and health weren’t wholly fulfilled; and citizens in need after climate disasters received insufficient support from the government. Boric’s term is also on track to have the lowest rate of growth since the return to democracy at 1.8%.
If economic success proved illusive, Boric can be credited for introducing reform to an antiquated and unjust pension system. Arana Araya said Boric’s most significant policy success has been pension reform.
In his campaign, Boric called for an end to Chile’s private pension system — a hallmark of the neoliberal past. And after passing a bill with bi-partisan support in Congress, from August 2025, employers are required to make mandatory contributions to the country’s new mixed pension system. The mandatory contribution rate is also set to gradually rise from 10% to 16% of the employee’s salary.
Although Boric had to drastically scale down his plans for a complete system overhaul, this step that ended a decades-long congressional deadlock will be central to his legacy. Boric’s reform will have “long-term consequences that improve pensions,” Arana Araya said.
Authority vs authoritarianism
As candidates set out their stalls to replace Boric, security and crime have played a dominant role in campaign discourse in recent months. According to research conducted by the University of San Sebastián, 80% of Chileans think visible crime has increased in the past six months. Indeed, since 2017, the murder rate has increased in 13 of 16 regions, according to the Universidad del Desarrollo, which also reported that common crimes like theft and robbery are trending downward.
And while Matthei’s campaign has centered on being tough on crime — having promised to build Chile’s largest prison à la El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele — Funk said that security can often be a weak point for the Latin American left.
“The regional left see authority as authoritarianism,” he said. However, he added that Boric can be credited with adapting to various security dilemmas: “He worked with police and the armed forces in the south to counteract terrorist threats and also in urban areas with violent crime.”
High expectations
Shouldering a mixed bag of success and failure upon his departure from office, Arana Araya partly blames Boric’s ambitious campaign, which raised expectations unattainably high.
Boric has not restructured the economy, nor rewritten the social contract, leaving his supporters “disappointed as he leaves office,” said Arana Araya.
Funk added that “On day to day issues, Chileans do not feel better or safer.” A May poll from Chile’s Center for Public Studies found that 66% of Chileans disapproved of Boric’s governing.
Despite this, Funk believes Boric and his movement could still have a strong political future.
According to the analyst, Boric’s strand of leftism — one that is built on environmentalism and feminism but is still comfortable criticizing communist regimes like Venezuela and Cuba and collaborating with the armed forces to improve security — could succeed.
In Chile, presidents are not allowed to run consecutively, but Boric himself could run for president again following whoever serves after him.
Leaving office at 39 will give Boric time to “give his movement some meat, some structure,” Funk concluded.
Featured image:
Source: Ministerio de las Culturas, las Artes y el Patrimonio Gobierno de Chile via Flikr
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/
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