Chile elected its future president this Sunday: a 59-year-old lawyer, leader of the far-right Republican Party, who obtained 58.3% of the votes, with 95% counted. Her opponent in this second round, the communist, 51-year-old lawyer, candidate of the left, has reached 41.7%, the worst result that progressivism has had since the return to democracy in 1990. The victory marks the arrival of the first leader from the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) to La Moneda, where he will succeed , who will leave office at the age of 40. Kast’s victory not only strengthens the conservative turn of the country, but also of much of South America, and to the extent that the degree of abruptness in his policies that Kast wants to apply as of March 11 is unknown.
Jara has quickly recognized defeat: “Democracy spoke loud and clear. I have just contacted the president-elect José Antonio Kast to wish him success for the good of Chile,” wrote the leftist candidate, who called Kast to congratulate him. “To those who supported us and were called by our candidacy, be clear that we will continue working to advance a better life in our homeland. Together and standing, as we have always done,” added the standard bearer of Boric’s ruling party.
The Chilean president-elect, who has won hand in hand with the other two important sectors of the right – the historical and the ultra of the Libertarian Party – and has done so comfortably, as the polls predicted, with 17 points of distance compared to Jara. to the main concerns of Chileans, crime and.
The result of the elections confirms that Chile can no longer explain itself according to , when at the polls Chileans rejected the continuity of Pinochet. The Andean country has left behind the division between Yeah and the No of that referendum, that is, between dictatorship and democracy, perpetrators and victims, that has ordered the Chilean political map in the last 35 years. Today, Chile is better understood according to the sides it left and the first attempt to change the Constitution, than by 62% against 38%: restoration and refoundation, which was what the left sought, pushed by radical sectors. It was an irrecoverable blow for the Boric Government that was beginning its first year in office.
It is the first time that a far-right president, nostalgic for Pinochetism, will come to La Moneda. Since the return to democracy, the right-wing Sebastián Piñera governed twice (2010-2014 and 2018-2022), but he was a rare review in his political sector: in the 1988 plebiscite, he came from a Christian Democrat family – which in Chile was identified with the center-left – and enjoyed freedom from economic groups because Piñera himself, although of the first generation. During his governments he took important steps, such as when he spoke of , in reference to the civilians who supported the regime, which caused a political earthquake among his allies.
Kast, on the other hand, participated in that plebiscite and during his public life – he was a deputy for the doctrinal party UDI, of the historic right, for 16 years – he has not broken with the Pinochet regime: he defends the dictatorship (in 2017 he said that if Pinochet were alive he would vote for him, although in 2021 he assured that anyone who has violated human rights, whether military or not, did not have his support). In this campaign, his third attempt, he chose not to focus on the recent past or on equal marriage or on initiatives he presented in the past such as the elimination of the Ministry of Women. He has promised to focus on a Emergency government.
He comes to power for four years, until March 2030, with, in a society that is worried about – the rate has doubled in the last 10 years, although it is still below that of most Latin American countries – and . Chile is the sixth most feared country in the world, according to Gallup’s 2025 global security report. Citizens are more afraid than in all Latin American countries (except Ecuador), although most of these countries have higher levels of insecurity.
Unlike the left, which has been slow to take on the challenge of tackling crime and which especially hits the poorest – it was not a priority for the Boric Government when it started -, the extreme right has focused its discourse on radical measures, such as a mega prison in the Atacama Desert. Citizens, who resist normalizing public insecurity, because it was not part of their lives in the past, have overwhelmingly supported Kast, which in parallel promises strong measures against the nearly 330,000 irregular migrants currently living in Chile, mostly Venezuelans. In the campaign, Kast counts daily the days left to take over the Government, the same ones that, he assures, remain for foreigners without papers to leave.
Kast will carry out a emergency government to tackle what he considers to be the three crises facing Chile: crime, irregular migration and low economic growth. He promises to tighten the state, -although he has not explained how-, although it is unknown whether or not he will push restrictions on the individual freedoms that Chile has gained in recent decades, such as the interruption of pregnancy in three cases. His main objective in this campaign has been the Boric Government, an Administration that he has classified as “inept”, among other disqualifiers. His campaign manager, Martín Arrau, given Kast’s probable victory, has dedicated himself to addressing the high expectations that have been generated for a candidate who has promised a radical change with respect to the current Government. “If someone expects everything to change on the first day, it won’t be like that,” he said a week ago.
He will not have majorities in Congress, although his party will, while the left will mainly exercise opposition from the Senate, where it still has strength. The current ruling party, meanwhile, begins a long dark night in which it will have to rethink its political project that does not excite the social groups it claims to represent. The popular sectors, in Chile, this Sunday, over which a great unknown flies: do you want to govern like or be a mixture of all?
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 traversed in recent years by a superposition of crises of order, governability and expectations.” Alenda assures that Kast does not appear out of nowhere: his candidacy capitalizes on accumulated fears and persistent discomforts that conventional politics has been unable to process. His triumph, therefore, he explains, should not be interpreted as a majority adherence to a coherent ideological project – aligned with radical conservatism and market liberalism – nor a nostalgic vindication of Pinochetism.
Six years after the social outbreak, which the left wrongly interpreted as a cry for equality and against the neoliberal model, and four years after Boric’s election – a commitment to change and a new political generation -, millions of Chileans have once again moved the pendulum and this Sunday they voted overwhelmingly for Kast.
