The results for the second round of the Chilean presidential election are in, and, to no one’s surprise, the victor is the right-wing candidate José Antonio Kast. Kast was the overwhelming favorite going into the second round, having prevailed over Evelyn Matthei and Johannes Kaiser in the contest to represent the Chilean right against the all-left coalition’s candidate, Jeannette Jara of the Communist Party of Chile. Jara was in dire electoral straits from the beginning of the campaign, with the election dominated by dissatisfaction with the present left-wing government of Gabriel Boric and worries over public safety and illegal immigration. The contest ended up a near landslide for Kast, who won 58 percent of the vote and carried every region in the country. His total of 7.1 million votes is the highest ever received by any candidate in Chilean history.
Kast’s victory opens a new epoch in Chilean politics, one that has seen the eclipse of the traditional Chilean right by new, more populist movements not afraid to break with the orthodoxy or the taboos of the political establishment. Kast’s Republican Party is such a one, taking a vigorously national conservative approach, as is Johannes Kaiser’s National Libertarian Party, following the rising tide of Javier Milei’s La Libertad Avanza in Argentina.
Notably, Kast is the most pro-Pinochet president Chile has ever had. The legacy of Pinochet in Chile has always been a controversial topic; his military government squashed Chilean democracy and initiated broad-based political repression aimed at rooting out and destroying left-wing movements. But Chile under his rule remained a relatively stable and prosperous country, no mean achievement compared to the chaos and poverty unfolding in many other Latin American countries at the time, and many Chileans credit Pinochet for saving the country from communism. Pinochet lost the 1988 referendum on his government that ultimately led to the reestablishment of Chilean democracy, but he still received 44 percent of the vote, showing that he retained significant support among the Chilean people.
That support, nevertheless, became something of a third rail in Chilean politics; even politicians on the right were generally averse to declaring that they had supported Pinochet in the referendum or to defending his government.
No longer. Kast’s brother Miguel served as a minister under Pinochet in the ’80s, and as a young man José Antonio himself featured in an advertisement urging Chileans to support the dictator in the 1988 referendum. Kast has never renounced his support for Pinochet, and even declared during his first presidential campaign in 2017 that “if Pinochet were alive, he would vote for me.”
Kast also represents a sharp break from the culturally progressive tendency in Chile. He broke from the traditional Chilean right, represented by the Unión Demócrata Independiente (UDI), when it moved towards abandoning social conservatism during the presidency of Sebastián Piñera. Piñera and his supporters on the moderate right believed that social conservatism was a dead-end with Chile’s secularizing population and formed an alliance with center-left to modernize Chilean law on such affairs as abortion and gay marriage. This proved intolerable to Kast and his strong Catholic social conservative disposition. His Republican Party remains sharply opposed to same-sex marriage and adoption, abortion, feminism, and the various ideological excesses of wokeness that have bled from the American left into left-wing movements in Chile. Ironically, this has made the thoroughly Catholic Kast the favorite candidate of the growing population of Evangelical Protestants in Chile, who also constitute the most stridently social conservative bloc of voters in the country.
Though the press has often tarred Kast as a “far-right extremist,” the president-elect has shown perfect moderation in his behavior so far. His victory speech was moderate and unifying, and his exchanges with the current president, Gabriel Boric, fulfilled all the demands of courtesy and propriety.
Chile’s prospects under Kast remain somewhat precarious. While right-leaning parties have a majority in the House of Deputies, the Senate remains deadlocked. Furthermore, the divisions on the Chilean right remain serious enough to cast significant doubt on the ability of Kast and his Republican Party to push through major legislation. Nor is Kast’s victory a certain endorsement of his comprehensive political program: The public rejected a proposed constitution drawn up largely by Kast and his supporters in 2023.
Post-election, Kast has tried to moderate his supporters’ expectations. While he campaigned on cracking down on immigration and mass deportation, he has been careful to explain that it may take a considerable amount of time for those efforts to bear fruit.
“We never said that on the first day we were going to be able to deport 300,000 or more people,” he said Tuesday. “It is obvious that we don’t have the ability to do that.”
His discussion of the economy has been similar. “We’re going to have a hard year, a very hard year,” he said, gesturing towards the economic policies of his predecessors. “The country’s finances are not good.”
One important change in Chilean politics under Kast will be significantly more friendly relations with the United States. Under Boric, Chile generally favored China, which had much to offer an export-oriented country with an America-skeptical leader. Chinese influence in contemporary Chile is massive; Chile signed onto the Belt and Road initiative in 2021 at the end of Piñera’s second term, and Chile’s mining economy has been deeply integrated into Chinese industrial supply chains, always hungry for additional raw materials. China is now Chile’s top trade partner and the destination for 40 percent of the country’s exports.
While Kast will have a hard time decoupling Chile from China, the situation certainly offers opportunities for a U.S. administration looking to reduce Chinese influence in the region, particularly if it can facilitate American investment in Chilean industry. Kast has made his interest in cultivating good relations with the Trump administration known—earlier this week he commented that he would support an American invasion of Venezuela. Whoever puts an end to the Maduro regime will be “solving a problem for us and for all of Latin America” by ending the flood of refugees and illegal immigrants flowing out of Venezuela, he told reporters.
Kast’s victory adds Chile to a growing number of Latin American countries that are turning rightwards, driven less by ideological conversion than by exhaustion with the insecurity, economic stagnation, and public disorder left-wing governments have continuously failed to confront. Whether Kast can translate that mood into durable political change will depend on his ability to govern effectively, manage a divided Congress, and maintain the support of a frustrated electorate. For now, Chile has made a decisive break with the political trajectory of the Boric years, signaling that the pendulum of Latin American politics, once again, is swinging back in the opposite direction.
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