Carolina Tohá: The Political Scientist Seeking to Be the Successor of Chilean Social Democracy

On Monday, May 12, when Carolina Tohá celebrated her 60th birthday at a restaurant in the always modern Yungay neighborhood of downtown Santiago – La Peluquería Francesa, popular among the progressive elite – the honoree at one point took the microphone and delivered a kind of stand-up routine, full of humor, about her biography. About 100 guests listened to her at this surprise party, which even featured mariachi musicians, with the Minister of Finance of the current government of Gabriel Boric, economist Mario Marcel, who has been Tohá’s partner since 2022, bringing in the cake with 60 candles. Tohá was definitely charming, laughing among her family and friends – many significant figures from Chile’s center-left over the past decades – revealing privately what she doesn’t always manage to convey publicly: freshness and lightness of character.

“Did you see that Carola has great humor?” commented one guest to another before the dance music began and Carolina and her boyfriend Mario stepped onto the dance floor.

The presidential candidate from Chile’s center-left – who belongs to one of the major families in this political sector, like the Allendes or the Lagos – has had to contend with those who view her as a strong woman who seldom smiles. She is being pursued – or perhaps surpassed – by the communist candidate, Jeannette Jara, who is empathetic and charismatic, much like Michelle Bachelet was in her prime. This comparison benefits the communist candidate, although Tohá disagrees: “I know Michelle Bachelet very well, and politically they represent very different things. They may resemble each other superficially – in their hair – but I’m not sure those things matter all that much.”

But Tohá’s battle actually targets a serious issue: the need to revive Chilean social democracy, which has been depressed for at least 15 years. In the primaries that Chile holds this Sunday, where Gabriel Boric’s ruling coalition will select the single candidate to face the right-wing parties in the first round on November 16, Tohá represents the moderate left. She aims to become the heir of a political tradition that was once strong in Chile: the one embodied by the Concertación governments – from the return to democracy in 1990 to 2010 – during two decades in which the center-left achieved a majority thanks to a historic alliance between the Socialist Party and the Christian Democracy (DC), which emerged in the final years of the dictatorship and facilitated a successful transition.

Although the DC is not part of the ruling coalition of the eight parties supporting Boric’s government, it has joined Tohá in this primary.

Former President Ricardo Lagos, the socialist who governed from 2000 to 2006, has also backed her. At 87 years old, since his retirement from public life, he has been seen in a photo waving a flag that read: “Tohá for president.”

However, the candidate has not received support from Bachelet, the former president who chose not to endorse any of the left’s primary candidates. In some way, she feels like the mother of all the lefts competing and, most importantly, of the one that currently holds hegemony in power. In Tohá’s circle, some resent Bachelet’s decision, considering that during her first government, the political scientist was a spokesperson and close collaborator. But this has been part of the difficulty Tohá has faced in this campaign: gaining support from the Socialist Party, where the former president is a member, has proven challenging.

Tohá has always been a prominent figure in Chilean politics. She was a university leader when, in April 1988, at just 22 years old, she appeared on an important live political television program alongside Lagos, then one of the main opposition leaders to dictator Augusto Pinochet. Her presence was refreshing, and on the eve of the plebiscite in October of that year, her image made the right wing nervous, which raced against time to find a young woman to participate in the same space: they found an economist named Evelyn Matthei, daughter of a general who was part of the regime’s Governing Junta. Coincidentally, both have been in the public eye for 37 years since their first appearances. Matthei will appear on the ballot on November 16 representing the traditional right, while Tohá’s fate will be decided this Sunday.

Daughter of José Tohá, Minister of the Interior and Defense under Salvador Allende, a socialist, who died after the 1973 coup following his arrest, torture, and interrogation. At that time, Carolina was eight years old: “I will never laugh again,” she told her mother, though the girl was mistaken. “My mom made sure I did smile. She has managed to keep my father’s memory alive for her children and, at the same time, help us fall in love with life again,” she told EL PAIS in November 2022.

Exiled in Mexico with her mother and brother – hence the mariachis at her 60th birthday celebration – she studied law at the University of Chile, where she became an important student leader opposed to the Pinochet regime. She did not graduate as a lawyer and resisted – despite offers – running for Congress. Earning a PhD in political science from the University of Milan, Italy, where she settled during the early years of democracy, Tohá has been a prominent figure in the inner workings of Chile’s center-left. She has served as a deputy, spokesperson for Bachelet’s first government, president of her party (PPD), and mayor of Santiago. This is part of the baggage she carries: her image does not embody renewal for the masses and, for some, she still surrounds herself with those who embodied rebellion in the 90s.

Had the center-left renewed itself, it should have counted figures like Tohá in the forefront, but that process did not materialize, and the next generation – that of President Boric himself – symbolically overshadowed them. It was only during the campaign for the plebiscite on the new Constitution in 2022 that Tohá assumed a leading role again: she supported a foundational proposal that was defeated at the polls, which has been relentlessly pointed out in this primary campaign. Her arrival in Boric’s government in September 2022 not only represented the influence of socialism in this new phase of the Administration, which had until then been supported by the president’s original coalition, the alliance between the Frente Amplio and the Communist Party. Tohá’s entrance to La Moneda symbolized an attempt at brotherhood among the different Chilean lefts, though her arrival at the Government Palace raised eyebrows among some prominent members of President Boric’s generation: Tohá represented what they wished to leave in the past and overcome.

However, the minister forged a good alliance with the president, and in the two and a half years she led the Interior Ministry, she sought to defend her idea of the “continuity and complementarity” of the governments of Lagos, Bachelet, and Boric. She took over the Interior Ministry with a titanic mission: to address the citizens’ demands for increased safety and crime control, the main concern of Chileans. It cannot be said that Tohá lacked the courage to take on that task, a bravery she demonstrated last March when she stepped up to take on another significant challenge: the presidential candidacy of what’s called Democratic Socialism, from the moderate left, at a time when black-and-white thinking is in vogue.

Yet during this campaign, Tohá has had to provide too many explanations – especially regarding insecurity and illegal immigration – and has found herself in the uncomfortable position of needing to differentiate herself from the government she was part of until March and the other political forces that make up the ruling coalition. She has, nonetheless, been emphatic in marking the distances between what she embodies and the PC of Jara.

During the campaign, she focused on central issues: “The left must accept without complexes that some of its recipes have been totally inadequate,” she said last April in an interview with Adolfo Kunjuk News. However, she is considered too centrist for the left of the Frente Amplio and the PC, while the right does not forgive her unconditional support for the current Boric government, which they view as a very poor administration.

The results this Sunday – Tohá began her race as the favorite, but has been losing that status – will show whether the Chilean center-left still has muscle.