LONDON – “The only way to get rid of temptation is to give in to it,” exclaims Lord Henry Wotton in Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Chileans took this advice seriously.
Four years ago, they were tempted by the promise of a progressive “refoundation” of Chile under Gabriel Boric, a former student leader. Chileans gave in to temptation and elected him the youngest and most left-wing president since the country’s return to democracy in 1990.
Illegal immigration, rising crime and a sluggish economy under Boric have led voters to another temptation: that of far-right former congressman José Antonio Kast, whose promises to expel immigrants and reduce taxes echo those of US President Donald Trump. Chileans gave in to temptation once again, electing Kast president with a record number of votes.
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Boric’s government was disappointing even to his own supporters. His plan for a new constitution produced a draft so radically “politically correct” that nearly two-thirds of voters rejected it in a referendum.
When Boric’s own young Broad Front ministers proved mostly incompetent, Chile’s Social Democrats came to the rescue, providing a team of safe hands. Still, with the exception of a pension reform in early 2025, the government can claim few achievements.
It’s no wonder, then, that voters punished Boric’s coalition at the polls. Jeannette Jara, his candidate and former communist minister in Boric’s cabinet, obtained a measly 41.8% of the vote. Kast won by more than 16 percentage points – the left’s worst electoral result since 1990.
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Will Kast also disappoint? It’s likely so. We know, from experience in other countries, that right-wing populists obtain their support more through identity stances than through political achievements, and Kast’s campaign promises seem, for the most part, unlikely.
Although Kast carefully avoids using the word deportation, his promise is to remove most or all of Chile’s 337,000 undocumented migrants. Trump has failed to deliver on a similar promise, and neither will Kast.
The Chilean State (including the Judiciary, which in most cases must authorize deportations) does not have the capacity to identify, arrest, detain, judge and then deport such a large number of people. Former conservative president Sebastián Piñera deported less than 7,000 people when he was in office between 2018 and 2022; the total under Boric is even lower.
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Kast’s other big promise is to cut $6 billion, or 7% of the total, from Chile’s budget. This is also unlikely. As in most countries, most spending goes to entitlements like pensions and educational subsidies that no one – not even Kast – wants to cut.
Furthermore, to pass any law in Congress, it will need the votes of center-right politicians who, in theory, are in favor of less spending, but, in practice, tend to protest whenever cuts affect their voters.
If Kast doesn’t cut spending, he won’t have the fiscal space to cut corporate taxes, as he has promised to do and as his business supporters hope. His foolish promise to abolish property taxes on primary residences could make the fiscal situation even more difficult.
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The big question, and the most important, is whether a frustrated Kast will try to cut costs and weaken the checks and balances of liberal democracy – as other far-right leaders have done, from Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil to Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Trump.
Despite all the shortcomings of his government, Boric has been scrupulously democratic. When the new constitution he championed was defeated at the polls, Boric gracefully accepted the result. Unlike other far-left leaders in Latin America, he did not hesitate to call Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro a dictator, nor to denounce Vladimir Putin’s criminal invasion of Ukraine.
Will Kast be so scrupulously democratic? His claim that General Augusto Pinochet, dictator of Chile from 1973 to 1990, would vote for him if he were alive does not bode well. Neither are the comments made by Kast during the campaign, suggesting that he did not need Congress to achieve his objectives and that it would be enough to issue decrees (he later backtracked on these statements).
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However, the center-right parties he will have to depend on will be a moderating force. He adopted a conciliatory tone in his victory speech, promising a government of broad agreements. Will he keep his word? Will it be like Trump or like the more moderate Giorgia Meloni, from Italy? No one can be sure.
One way or another, Kast’s victory will have lasting consequences. This election was a perfect illustration of Yeats’s dictum that “the center cannot hold”.
The center-left candidate in the race, the highly qualified Carolina Tohá, lost to Jara by a wide margin in the pro-government bloc’s primaries. And the center-right candidate, the highly qualified Evelyn Matthei, made it to the general election but finished in fifth place.
Just like Argentines, Americans, Britons and many others, Chileans are not willing to support discreetly competent candidates when they have belligerent and aggressive populists at their disposal.
The political center is likely to shrink further. By joining Boric in office, the Social Democrats saved their government but eroded their own political capital. As Britain’s Liberal Democrats learned when they joined the Conservatives in coalition, the junior partner does not get credit for the government’s achievements, but gets all the blame for its failures.
The same will now happen with Chile’s center-right forces. The offer to join Kast’s cabinet will be too tempting to refuse. If he starts playing with democratic rules, they will have to grin and bear it at first. If he persists, however, they will have to react, with an ugly political fight to follow. Neither result will earn the center-right much love from voters.
With Chile’s traditional centrist parties greatly weakened, the new opinion leader in Congress will be the Popular Party of Franco Parisi, a demagogue who came in third place in the first round of the presidential elections. Having given in to populist temptations in two consecutive election cycles, voters will give in to their own charm four years from now, Parisi hopes.
Or, having learned the hard way that giving in to temptation only produces a hangover, Chileans may decide to vote for a quietly competent reformer. This is the hope that is eternally reborn.
Translation by Fabrício Calado Moreira
Andrés Velasco, former finance minister of Chile, is dean of the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2025
