This Sunday, Chile elected its future president: José Antonio Kast, a 59-year-old lawyer, leader of the far-right Republican Party, who obtained 58.3% of the votes, 95% of which were counted. His opponent in this second round, the communist Jeannette Jara, a 51-year-old lawyer and left-wing candidate, reached 41.7%, the worst result that progressivism has known since the return to democracy in 1990. This victory marks the arrival of the first leader who did not distance himself from the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) in La Moneda, where he will succeed Gabriel Boric, leader of a new left, who will leave office at age 40. Kast’s victory not only strengthens the conservative turn of the country, but also of much of South America, and puts Chile’s institutionality to the test to the extent that it is unknown the degree of abruptness in his policies that Kast wants to apply from March 11.
Jara quickly recognized his defeat: “Democracy has spoken loud and clear. I have just contacted President-elect José Antonio Kast to wish him success for the good of Chile,” wrote the left-wing candidate, who called Kast to congratulate him. “To those who supported us and were called by our candidacy, make it clear that we will continue to work for a better life in our country. Together and standing up, as we have always done,” added the standard-bearer of Boric’s ruling party.
The Chilean president-elect, who won hand in hand with the two other important sectors of the right – the historic and the ultra of the Libertarian Party – and did so comfortably, as the polls predicted, with 17 points difference compared to Jara. He promised order and security in the face of Chileans’ main concerns, crime and irregular migration.
The result of the elections confirms that Chile can no longer be explained by the sides of the 1988 plebiscite, when at the polls the Chileans rejected the continuity of Pinochet. The Andean country has left behind the division between Yeah and the No of this referendum, that is to say between dictatorship and democracy, executioners and victims, which has ordered the Chilean political map over the last 35 years. Today, Chile is better understood from the sides left by the social breakdown of October 2019 and the first attempt to change the Constitution, rejected in September 2022 by 62% against 38%: restoration and refoundation, what the left, pushed by radical sectors, was looking for. It was an irremediable blow for the Boric government which was entering its first year in office.
This is the first time that a far-right president, nostalgic for Pinochetism, comes to La Moneda. Since the return to democracy, the right-wing Sebastián Piñera party has governed twice (2010-2014 and 2018-2022), but it has been a rare bird in his political sector: he had voted for No to Pinochet in the 1988 plebiscite, he came from a Christian Democratic family – which in Chile was identified with the center-left – and enjoyed freedom from economic groups because Piñera himself was a millionaire, albeit first generation. In his governments he took important steps, such as when he spoke of the “passive accomplices” of the dictatorship, in reference to civilians who supported the regime, which caused a political earthquake among his allies.
Kast, on the other hand, participated by supporting the option Yeah of this plebiscite and during his public life – he was for 16 years a deputy of the party of doctrinal training UDI, of the historic right – he did not break with the Pinochet regime: he defends the dictatorship (in 2017 he declared that if Pinochet were alive, he would vote for him, although in 2021 he assured that anyone who violated human rights, whether military or not, did not have his support). In this campaign, his third attempt, he has chosen not to focus on the recent past nor on his positions against abortion, marriage equality or on initiatives he has presented in the past such as the elimination of the Ministry of Women. He promised to focus on a Emergency government.
He comes to power for four years, until March 2030, with the promise of order and security, in a society that is worried about the increase in homicides – the rate has doubled in the last ten years, although it remains lower than that of most Latin American countries – and new types of crimes. Chile is the sixth most feared country in the world, according to the Gallup Global Security Report 2025. Citizens are more fearful than in any Latin American country (except Ecuador), even though most of these countries experience higher levels of insecurity.
Unlike the left, which was slow to take up the challenge of fighting delinquency and organized crime which particularly affects the poorest – this was not a priority for the Boric government at the start – the far right focused its discourse on radical measures, such as a mega prison in the Atacama desert. Citizens, who resist the normalization of public insecurity, because it was not part of their lives in the past, overwhelmingly supported Kast, who at the same time promises strong measures against the nearly 330,000 irregular migrants currently living in Chile, most of them Venezuelans. In the campaign, Kast daily counts the days remaining to take power, the same which, he assures, remain for foreigners undocumented leave.
Kast will carry out a emergency government to address what he sees as the three crises facing Chile: crime, irregular migration and low economic growth. He promises to toughen the state and cut tax spending by $6.5 billion – although he has not explained how – although it is unclear whether or not he will push for restrictions on individual freedoms that Chile has gained in recent decades, such as terminating pregnancies in three cases. His main focus in this campaign has been the Boric government, an administration he has called “incompetent,” among other disqualifying elements. His campaign manager, Martín Arrau, given Kast’s likely victory, dedicated himself to meeting the high expectations raised by a candidate who promised a radical change from the current government. “If anyone expects everything to change from day one, it’s not going to be like that,” he said a week ago.
He will not have a majority in Congress, even though his party has grown considerably in the Chamber of Deputies, while the left will mainly exert its opposition from the Senate, where it still has strength. The current ruling party is entering a long dark night during which it will have to rethink its political project which does not excite the social groups it claims to represent. The popular sectors in Chile showed, this Sunday, once again that they are on the side of Kast, over whom a great unknown hangs: does he want to govern like Meloni, Bolsonaro, Milei or be a mixture of them all?
Academic Stéphanie Alenda believes that it is hasty to read tonight’s results as a new trend, but rather as “the clearest expression of the exhaustion of a political cycle and the failure of traditional forces – left, center and right – to offer credible responses to a country crossed in recent years by a superposition of crises of order, governability and expectations”. Alenda assures that Kast did not appear out of nowhere: his candidacy capitalizes on accumulated fears and persistent unease that conventional politics has been incapable of managing. His triumph, he explains, should therefore not be interpreted as majority adherence to a coherent ideological project – aligned with radical conservatism and market liberalism – nor as a nostalgic claim to Pinochetism.
Six years after the social crisis, which the left wrongly interpreted as a cry for equality and against the neoliberal model, and four years after the election of Boric – a commitment to change and a new political generation – millions of Chileans once again moved the pendulum and this Sunday they voted massively for Kast.
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