José Antonio Kast will be president of Chile from March 11, 2026. This is what the voters decided this Sunday in the second electoral round, where Kast obtained 58.3%, with 95% counted, against 41.7% for Jeannette Jara, candidate to the left of Gabriel Boric, member of the Communist Party.
This was no surprise: Polls have repeatedly shown that Kast would comfortably win this election. He triumphed with a distance of 16.6 points compared to Jara, who obtained the worst percentage that the left has ever achieved in the second round. In 2017, Alejandro Guiller reached 45.2% against right-wing Sebastián Piñera, who became president for the second time with 54.8%.
In this second round, Kast arrived supported by all sectors of the right: the extreme of the Republican Party, his party; the historical one, grouped in Chile Vamos; and the ultras of Johannes Kaiser’s Libertarian Party.
With the system of automatic voter registration and compulsory voting, installed in Chile three years ago, Kast will be president with the largest pool of votes that any president has ever had in the history of this country: more than seven million votes.
This is the first time since the return to democracy in 1990 that a far-right president has arrived in La Moneda, who has not broken with the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Over the past 35 years, the right-wing Piñera party has governed twice, but he was an unusual figure in his political sector: first because he voted no to Pinochet in the 1988 plebiscite. Kast, on the other hand, participated in supporting the Yes option in that plebiscite and during his public life he never broke with the regime: he defends it (in 2017 he said that if Pinochet were alive he would vote for him, although in 2021, in his second attempt to reach La Moneda, he assured that anyone who violated human rights 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 an emergency government focused on fighting crime, irregular migration and economic growth.
Has the map of Chilean politics changed? Is the dichotomy between dictatorship and democracy, between executioners and victims, as some analysts propose, no longer ordered between yes and no to Pinochet in 1988? Or, as academic Stephanie Alenda puts it, is Kast’s victory instead the clearest expression of the exhaustion of a political cycle and the failure of all traditional forces – left, center and right – to offer credible answers to the country?
This is what we will begin to untangle from today. The left, in any case, begins a long dark night this Sunday.
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