General elections were held in Chile on 14 December 1989, bringing an end to the military regime that had been in place since 1973. Patricio Aylwin of Concertación alliance was elected President, whilst the alliance also won a majority of seats in the Chamber of Deputies and in the elected Senate seats.

From the 1989 elections onwards the military had officially left the political future of the country to civilians to be elected. Pinochet did not endorse any candidate publicly. Former dictatorship minister Hernán Büchi ran for president as candidate of the two right-wing parties, RN and UDI. He had little political experience and was a relatively young (40 years) technocrat credited for Chile's good economic performance in the later half of the 1980s. The right parties faced several problems in the elections: there was considerable infighting between RN and UDI, Büchi had only very reluctantly accepted to run for president and right-wing politicians struggled to define their position towards the Pinochet regime. In addition to this right-wing populist Francisco Javier Errázuriz Talavera ran independently for president and made several election promises Büchi could not match.

Candidate Aylwin prevailed in a political negotiation within the so-called Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia, which at that time was made up of 17 political movements opposed to the military dictatorship. However, the process was not simple. The situation of each party was as follows:

The national organization, ideological moderation, and relative weight within the coalition ultimately led the Christian Democratic Party to determine the presidential candidacy. In this decision, the media prominence of Patricio Aylwin—when he previously obtained the nomination as spokesperson or “primus inter pares” among the leaders of the Concertación for the 1988 plebiscite—was influential, allowing him to secure the coalition’s backing over alternatives from the moderate left such as Ricardo Lagos, Alejandro Hales, and Enrique Silva Cimma, which were reconsidered toward the end of the process.

Aylwin’s nomination as the Concertación’s candidate took place on July 6—having already been proclaimed as their candidate by the Party of the Center Alliance on June 28 and by the Democratic Socialist Radical Party on July 2, as well as by the Christian Left on July 4—,while his formal proclamation was held on July 16, 1989, at the Teatro Caupolicán, a symbol of democratic resistance during the military dictatorship, under the slogan “The people win.”On August 2, the Broad Party of Socialist Left (PAIS) proclaimed Aylwin as its candidate.

Supporters of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship also underwent a lengthy process of deliberation to designate their candidate. The figure of Hernán Büchi—Minister of Finance and ideologue of the neoliberal reforms reintroduced in Chile after the 1982 crisis—generated sympathy due to his youthful image and his close association with the country’s supposedly successful economic recovery. However, Büchi systematically refused to accept the option of being a candidate and declined to do so in a speech delivered on May 15, 1989, which went down in Chilean political history, as he acknowledged that between his personality and the responsibility being imposed on him there existed a “vital contradiction,” thus renouncing his pre-candidacy.

In that context, on August 6 National Renewal designated former Interior Minister Sergio Onofre Jarpa as its nominee through an internal vote in which he obtained 272 votes in favor, 3 against, and one blank;the Radical Democracy did the same with former senator Julio Durán Neumann, while the UDI proclaimed Hernán Büchi despite his refusal.

Büchi finally accepted being a candidate on July 11,and in a political negotiation, the Democracy and Progress pact and the Radical Democracy partynamed him as their nominee under the slogan “Büchi is the man.” On August 10, he received the formal backing of National Renewal, which withdrew the support it had given to Sergio Onofre Jarpa only four days earlier.