It was the surprise of the day, and the polls didn't see it coming. Franco Parisi, the leader of the People's Party (PDG), won 19.80% of the vote in the Chilean presidential elections this Sunday, finishing in third place and easily surpassing the libertarian leader, Johannes Kaiser (13.94%), and the Chile Vamos candidate, Evelyn Matthei (12.44%).
The economist thus became ipso facto the “darling” of Chilean politics, since he has already said loud and clear that he will not endorse his 2,550,770 votes to either the official candidate, Jeannette Jara (26.75%), or the Republican leader, José Antonio Kast (23.96%), who will compete in the runoff election on December 14, and whom he called upon to “earn the votes.”
“I don’t give anyone a blank check, that’s disrespectful. I have bad news for candidate Kast and candidate Jara: earn the votes, win the people in the streets. I need gestures from them. The PDG doesn’t need any favors,” he stated emphatically that night from his campaign headquarters.
Mining vote
In this third presidential adventure, and as in 2013 and 2021 -in which he scored 10% and 12.8% of votes at the national level, respectively-, his greatest support was given in the mining north, especially in the regions of Antofagasta, Arica and Parinacota, Tarapacá and Atacama, in which he came out on top over Jara and Kast.
Furthermore, the PDG won at least 10 seats in this parliamentary election, which is why representatives of Jara and Kast's campaign have already begun to lay the groundwork.
“There are phenomena that one must take into account, for example, the vote that Franco Parisi achieves (...) there is an electoral influence that will have to be discussed,” said Lautaro Carmona, president of the PC and the party where Jara belongs.
Meanwhile, Arturo Squella, president of the Republican Party, stated that for now, “I cannot decide on candidates with whom I haven't had the opportunity to speak, but indeed, when one sees what lies behind the positions of those candidates, one could hope to have a good conversation and count on support from all sectors of the center so that we can defeat Jara on December 14th.”
Who is Franco Parisi?
Owner of a populist centrist discourse -"not fascists or communists" - that appeals to those disillusioned with the political system and with a strong presence on social media, the presidential candidacies of Franco Parisi (58 years old) have not been without controversy.
In 2013, he surrendered everything, even his underwear, to the Electoral Service (Servel), an issue he himself described as an"own goal." In 2016, he was accused of alleged sexual harassment by a student at a university in Texas, and in the 2021 elections, he had to run a digital campaign from the US, as he was barred from entering Chile due to a multimillion-dollar child support debt to his ex-wife, still managing to achieve third place behind Kast and Gabriel Boric.
Thus, and despite the fact that the polls gave him no more than 10%, Parisi went on to consolidate himself as a center-right alternative to the right-left dichotomy, thanks to proposals such as tax cuts for the middle class, the reduction of salaries of high-ranking public officials, the expulsion of illegal migrants, the fight against organized crime and even the implementation of a curious “prison-ship”.
Because of this, his political group, the PDG, now appears as a “swing party”, and it remains to be seen whether its members will hold an internal consultation to decide who they will support in the runoff election on December 14 - just as they did in 2021 - where they ended up backing José Antonio Kast, who ultimately lost the election to Boric.
