Chile and Peru enter the mid-2020s in post-representative South America, facing a similar condition where erosion of representation, social fragmentation, and the exhaustion of the political forms inherited from the late 20th century social and economic changes. Yet their responses diverge sharply. One attempts to restore order by recentralizing power from above as Boric administration has been doing and newly elected Kast is proposing to continue; the other survives by navigating fragmentation from within. The contrast reveals two distinct trajectories in current South America’s post-representative moment.

Chile: the order and the mandate without society

Chile’s newly elected president may represent a restoration of elite control rather than a renewal of political legitimacy. In this view power is recentralized through security, legal hardening, and macroeconomic reassurance. Capital, traditional parties, and conservative institutions align around the common objective of stability.

But stability here is procedural, not social. There is no governance in the strong sense—no mediation, no recomposition of representation, no structural integration of the forces that erupted in 2019. The failure of the constitutional process did not resolve Chile’s crisis; it froze it (withn the help of Boric). The political system survived by becoming openly non-representative.

Chile governs against disorder, not through society. Security replaces authority. Policing substitutes for social articulation. Economic orthodoxy restores confidence for investors but leaves unresolved the structural segmentation of wages, housing, pensions, and public services. What emerges is not order, but managed fragility where the state appears strong from above and hollow from below.

In Chile, elite continuity is the problem. The same social bloc that exhausted its legitimacy remains in control, incapable of transforming the system because it is the system. Power concentrates; representation erodes. Crisis does not explode—it deepens quietly.

Peru: organic autonomy without illusion

Peru offers no model of coherence or institutional elegance. Its politics are unstable, its parties weak, its public sphere fragmented. Yet precisely because of this, Peru has not attempted a false restoration of order. Instead of freezing society under elite consensus, Peru navigates its contradictions pragmatically.

Peru’s political life is post-party and often informal, but it remains socially expressive. Territorial actors, informal economies, local power arrangements, and fragmented institutions continue to interact. Representation is weak, but politics has not fully detached from society. The state does not govern cleanly, but neither does it govern entirely from above.

This produces a paradoxical form of autonomy. Peru does not recentralize power; it distributes it unevenly across spaces, actors, and scales. Crisis becomes permanent, but also manageable. Rather than suppressing bottom-up forces, the system absorbs them partially, inconsistently, and often chaotically.

This adaptive disorder extends to foreign policy. Peru practices multi-vector diplomacy, it is engaging the United States, China, regional partners, and Asian markets without binding itself exclusively to any of them. Unlike Chile’s inward restoration or Argentina’s proxy alignment, Peru preserves room to maneuver.

Two Futures, Two Risks

Chile’s risk is legitimacy erosion under apparent order. Peru’s risk is chronic instability without consolidation. Yet in a region where representation has collapsed, these risks are not symmetrical.

Chile’s strategy assumes that authority can be restored without social recomposition. Peru’s experience suggests the opposite: that political survival depends on remaining permeable to society, even at the cost of instability.

In the long run, governance without society hardens into coercion. Autonomy without illusion, however fragile, preserves adaptability.

Conclusion

Chile and Peru illustrate two divergent responses to the same historical condition. Chile seeks order through recentralized power; Peru survives through distributed, imperfect autonomy. One freezes conflict; the other metabolizes it.

In an era of post-representative politics, the question is not which system looks more stable today, but which retains the capacity to change and move tomorrow.

The contrast between Chile and Peru today is real, but it is not absolute. Chile’s history has always been closer to Peru’s than to the model of liberal order it tried to embody. The current moment does not erase differences, but it dissolves illusions, as the present is what matters.

The future of both countries will not be decided by how much order they impose, but by how well they learn to govern with society rather than against it.