Chile is expected to elect its most right-wing president since Pinochet on Sunday

With a dominant lead in opinion polls and an electorate crying out for security, far-right candidate José Antonio Kast is expected to win Chile’s presidential runoff on Sunday, becoming the country’s most conservative leader since the military dictatorship.

Kast is running against Jeannette Jara, candidate of the government’s left-wing coalition and member of the Communist Party. A victory for Kast would represent the country’s most significant political change in decades and add to a growing wave of right-wing governments in Latin America, driven by concerns about crime and migration.

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“This would bring Chile’s most right-wing president since Pinochet to power,” said Nicholas Watson, managing director of consultancy Teneo, referring to Augusto Pinochet, a dictator who ruled the country with an iron fist between 1973 and 1990.

Kast, 59, campaigned as a student to keep Pinochet in power during the 1988 referendum, but Watson points out that he is a Democrat and less bombastic than other right-wing leaders in the region, such as Argentina’s Javier Milei or Salvador’s Nayib Bukele.

“Kast is no Pinochet,” Watson said. “One of the big questions, if he wins, is how ideologically flexible he will be.”

Congress moderator

A hard-liner throughout a career that began in local politics, Kast broke away from the traditional, conservative Independent Democratic Union Party in 2016 and founded his current Republican Party.

Republicans played a leading role in Chile’s second attempt to rewrite its constitution, which dates back to Pinochet’s dictatorship, but was rejected by voters because it was considered polarizing and more conservative than the original text.

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Now, Kast promises to send the military to high-crime neighborhoods, build border walls and trenches and create a specialized police force, modeled after US immigration, to track and deport illegal migrants, most of them Venezuelans, according to government data.

Although the Republican Party and other far-right parties gained influence in Congress in the November elections, the legislature is divided between right and left, requiring negotiations to approve reforms.

The lawmakers Kast will need to secure a majority are moderates, said Patricio Navia, a liberal studies professor at New York University.

“If he starts governing from the extreme right, he will be a minority president and won’t be able to do anything,” he said.

Outgoing President Gabriel Boric, who promised to turn Chile into the tomb of neoliberalism, faced the same problem with a divided Congress. His attempt to rewrite the constitution was also overwhelmingly rejected.

Chileans expect quick changes from the new president, said Marta Lagos, founder of Latinobarómetro, a public opinion survey in Latin America.

“I don’t think he’s going to have a honeymoon at first. If in a week he can’t stop carjackings and shootings, they’ll say he wasn’t successful,” he said.

Investors have already priced in expectations of a political shift to the right, driving a year-long market recovery based on more market-friendly policies and regulations.

Undecided voters

In the first round of the presidential election on November 16, Jara and Kast won about a quarter of the votes each, with Jara narrowly ahead.

Most of the other candidates were right-wing, and their votes were expected to go to Kast, giving him the 50% needed to win.

Populist outsider Franco Parisi came in third place, with just under 20% of the vote, and asked his voters to vote blank. Voting on Sunday is mandatory, and polls indicate that around 20% of voters are undecided, increasing uncertainty.

However, most analysts consider Jara’s chance of victory to be very small and believe that the main question is how much Kast will win and how he will govern.

“The most important thing on Sunday will not be whether Kast wins, we already know that, but what he will say in his speech,” said Navia. “Is it a sign of unity or division?”