General elections were held in Chile on 11 December 1993 to elect the President, members of the Chamber of Deputies and elected members of the Senate. Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle of the Concertación alliance was elected president, and the alliance also won a majority of seats in the Chamber of Deputies and maintained its majority in the Senate. As of 2026, this is the most recent presidential election that did not result in a runoff.

The Concertación, which had governed with Patricio Aylwin since 1990, needed to choose a successor who would run as their presidential candidate in the 1993 elections. To determine their candidate, the parties decided to hold primary elections, marking a historic milestone as it was the first time in Chile that a political coalition used this mechanism to select its sole candidate. Participation in these primaries required prior registration of voters, and there was no law or support from the Election Certification Tribunal (Tricel) or the Electoral Service (Servel) to regulate them.

The Christian Democratic Party (PDC) chose Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, the son of former President Eduardo Frei Montalva, as their candidate. Frei Ruiz-Tagle had previously run as a pre-candidate for the Concertación in the 1989 presidential election, but was unsuccessful. He then focused on strengthening his position within the PDC and achieved this by winning a senatorial election in the Santiago Oriente constituency in 1989 and becoming the party's president in 1990.

The other pre-candidate was Ricardo Lagos Escobar, a prominent leader of the Party for Democracy (PPD), who also had the support of the Socialist Party (PS) due to his participation in the "No" campaign in the 1988 plebiscite. Lagos had run as a senatorial candidate for the Santiago Poniente constituency in 1989, but despite finishing second, he lost due to the workings of the binomial electoral system. In 1990, he became Minister of Education in the Aylwin government, a position he held until 1992 when he left to begin his presidential campaign.

An unsuccessful attempt was made to nominate Senator Anselmo Sule of the Radical Party (PR) and Cristián Reitze, president of the Humanist Green Alliance party, as candidates. Reitze later left the Concertación after realizing that there was a move to exclude him from the primary.

On May 23, 1993, the primaries were held, and Frei won by 64% of the vote, officially becoming the candidate on May 30. The PS and PPD respected the outcome and supported the chosen candidate.

In 1992, the largest right-wing party at the time, Renovación Nacional (RN), had two presidential pre-candidates: Senator for Santiago Oriente Sebastián Piñera and Deputy for Las Condes, Vitacura, and Lo Barnechea Evelyn Matthei. However, the aftermath of the Piñeragate political scandal that same year put an end to their aspirations, prompting RN to search for a new candidate. Manuel Feliú was ultimately selected as the replacement.

The Independent Democratic Union (UDI) initially nominated Jovino Novoa, its president, as its pre-candidate. However, there was a third candidate who gained support from various right-wing parties, particularly the UDI. This candidate was Arturo Alessandri Besa, an independent senator for Antofagasta who had family ties to two former presidents: Jorge Alessandri and Arturo Alessandri Palma.