José Antonio Kast had not been president of Chile for two weeks before a war on the other side of the world began to tank his administration.
Kast took office on March 11 with a commanding electoral mandate and a net approval rating of about 20 points. By the end of the month, however, his approval had already slipped underwater. The immediate cause had little to do with anything Kast had done. Chileans were furious about the surge in fuel prices caused by the Iran War, and they blamed the man who had just moved into La Moneda.
It was not supposed to go this way.
Kast was well-positioned going into the presidential race in 2025. Defeated convincingly by social democrat Gabriel Boric in the 2021 presidential election runoff, Kast had significantly expanded his political base in the intervening years. His electoral vehicle, the Republican Party of Chile — which he founded in 2019 — made major gains in local elections in 2024, which swung sharply to the right.
Kast campaigned on a law-and-order platform, promising to crack down on illegal immigration and organized crime, issues that have occupied an increasingly uncomfortable place in the Chilean political imagination since 2020. His promises to revive the economy also struck a chord. Chilean economic growth, heavily dependent on mining, has disappointed since the end of the Chinese commodity boom in the mid-2010s.
Ready to dispense with the left after Boric’s unpopular and unsuccessful presidency, Chileans delivered Kast a commanding victory in the 2025 presidential election. He defeated Jeannette Jara, the left-wing candidate and a member of the Communist Party of Chile, by over 15 points, winning 58.2 percent of the vote to Jara’s 41.8 percent. Chile appeared poised to join the broader rightward swing underway across Latin America.
Kast’s rosy-looking future, however, collapsed in very short order. The Iran War, which President Donald Trump had kicked off at the very tail end of February, put a massive dent in the Chilean economy just before Kast was sworn in. Chile is one of the region’s largest importers of oil and gas; with almost no domestic production, the country is particularly sensitive to changes in the global energy market. Its modest fuel stabilization fund, set up to help blunt the impact of sudden price swings, was insufficient to cover the massive shock brought on by the war, and by late March subsidizing fuel for Chilean consumers was costing the government nearly $150 million a week.
Kast entered office promising to lower the national deficit, a project that would be completely impossible to achieve if he were compelled to spend billions on fuel subsidies. The president therefore decided to abandon price stabilization and pass the costs on to Chilean consumers.
It was the only realistic option, but the move was nevertheless deeply unpopular. And it left a major hole in the pocketbook of the average Chilean: Between March and April, national gasoline prices surged by nearly 40 percent. And these price hikes affect more than just motorists. Nearly every good that is sold in Chile must travel by road at some point, and higher fuel costs filter into food, manufactured and imported goods, and eventually practically every consumer item in the country.
The adjustment was particularly painful for an economy as dependent on fuel-intensive industries like mining as that of Chile: Unemployment hit 9.4 percent in the March–May 2026 period, and the Chilean Central Bank revised its economic projections downwards twice (from 2-3 percent annual growth in 2026 down to 1-1.75 percent).
It was an extremely inauspicious way for Kast to begin his presidency, and his approval ratings have remained stubbornly negative ever since. There is little sign of relief on the horizon. The Chilean economy remains extremely weak, and the Iran War continues to drag on with no end in sight. With Iran and the U.S. deadlocked over the Strait of Hormuz, high oil prices will probably dog Kast for the remainder of his critical first year as president.
To his credit, Kast has attempted to rally. With energy that surprised many Chilean commentators, he pushed a massive economic reform package through the legislature. This “megareform,” as Kast calls it, significantly restructures the country’s tax system, lowering the corporate tax rate and heavily incentivizing both domestic and foreign investment. His administration also announced across-the-board budget cuts for most government ministries as part of efforts to bring down the deficit. But as important and meaningful as these initiatives are, their impact will take time to make itself felt, and they are unlikely to move the needle for Kast politically in the short term.
In one of the ironies so common to politics, the Trump administration’s actions in Iran have made it significantly more difficult for the U.S. to accomplish one of its major goals closer to home. Kast and his allies on the Chilean right are broadly pro-American, and would be pleased to accept U.S. help in reducing their country’s dependence on China. Chinese corporations are heavily invested in Chilean mining, construction, and transportation industries, and vast quantities of Chilean minerals feed China’s domestic manufacturing economy. But the precarious economic situation in Chile will make it difficult for the country to pivot, even if Kast would prefer to do so, and the Trump administration is unable to take advantage of the situation. Instead, America is allowing collateral damage from its interventions further abroad to politically kneecap a friendly government in its own backyard.
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