Estallido social en Chile: un caso de populismo imperfecto

Objective/context: This article assesses whether Chile’s social uprising constitutes a populist moment from a Laclauian perspective, identifying the discursive mechanisms that make it recognizable in collective action. Methodology: Thirty-one in-depth interviews (May-September 2020) were conducted with organizations that played leading roles in the revolt, spanning feminism, labor, environmentalism, the student movement, and human rights, among other areas. Conclusions: The uprising operated as an imperfect populist phenomenon by drawing a people-elite frontier and an equivalential chain synthesized by the empty signifier “dignity,” which catalyzed a post-neoliberal horizon condensed in the demand for a new Constitution, albeit without the emergence of a unifying charismatic leader. Originality: It offers qualitative empirical evidence grounded in organizational experiences to read the Chilean revolt through populist theory.