More than 300 militants of the Party for Democracy (PPD), to which the former socialist president Ricardo Lagos (2000-2006) belonged at the end of the 1980s, will resign within the next 48 hours from the party and create the movement Firmes por Chile, according to an announcement made this Friday by the now former national vice president, Cristóbal Barra. The former leader argued that there is a “total absence of democracy and internal legality” and also denounced that there is “a barely disguised complicity strategy at the parliamentary level with the agenda of the Government of [José Antonio] Kast, with the catastrophic consequences this has for the most vulnerable sectors and Chilean families.”
Barra, who leads those who will leave the party along with the vice president, Bárbara Sepúlveda, and the president of the PPD youth, Lukas Soto, communicated his resignation, which was formalized before the Electoral Service (Servel), through a letter released this Friday. “After more than a decade of militancy within the PPD, we announce our irrevocable resignation from the party. Those of us who sign this letter represent the entirety of the youth of the PPD and half of the adult membership of the party (…) We leave with the peace of mind of having given our best efforts to the development of Chile and with the certainty that the PPD has ceased to be a useful instrument to serve national interests.”
And they added that their convictions “of progressive and democratic left remain intact and grow in this conjuncture.” Then, they announced that they will push the new movement.
Barra questions that some PPD senators, during the processing of Kast’s mega reform, which was approved in early August, supported the proposal of “tax invariability” for large investors, and added that “when it came time to vote on the non-payment of contributions, they also supported that. The Supreme Court is dedicated to persecuting some people, but not those who vote against the party’s principles.”
“We represent half of the internal vote, it is not a minor gesture. Obviously, it will be a blow to the PPD, but we do not do it to strike the party, we do it for reasons of principle,” he said.
The former leader also complained that the result of the internal election last May was not respected within the party and that in response “there was no response from the board” but “a complicit silence.” “The Supreme Court acted as a mechanism that bypassed internal democracy and a party that claims to defend democracy is very inconsistent if it does not respect internal democracy.”
The PPD, meanwhile, responded to the announcement of the resignations. And in a public statement, the secretary general, Sebastián Vergara, said that “this resignation responds both to the adverse result they obtained in the internal elections last May 31 and to a series of challenges that are currently being reviewed by the party’s Supreme Court, for which their departure was, in any case, imminent.”
Vergara highlighted that the PPD “today has more than 26,000 militants across the country, and just in 2026 alone, 435 new militants have joined our collective.”
“We downplay the departure of some former militants. We are in a democracy and respect the decision of those who choose to follow other paths, even if that means breaking the vote of confidence that the PPD once gave them,” the statement says. “It is not coherent to be a member of the PPD while, publicly and for months, advancing the construction of a new political party, contravening the democratic principles and statutory norms that support our collective,” Vergara said.
The PPD, a moderate left-wing formation, was born at the end of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973-1990) as an instrumental party. Among its founders, besides Ricardo Lagos, are former senators Guido Girardi and Sergio Bitar, who was also a minister of state in the governments of Salvador Allende (1970-1973), Lagos, and Michelle Bachelet (2006-2010, 2014-2019). In 2025, political scientist Carolina Tohá, former Interior Minister in Gabriel Boric’s government (2022-2026), was a presidential candidate in the Chilean left’s primary elections.