Barring some unlikely last-minute shifts, Chile is poised to elect the ultra-conservative José Antonio Kast as its president on 14 December. Kast finished second in the first round of voting on 16 November, three points behind Jeannette Jara of the left Unidad por Chile coalition. But as victories go, hers was of a distinctly hollow kind. Minister of Labour and Social Security in the government of Gabriel Boric since 2022 and a member of Chile’s Communist Party, Jara obtained only 27 per cent of the vote. This was among the left’s weakest performances since Chile’s return to democracy in 1989, and the electoral arithmetic points to a thumping win for Kast in the run-off.

The November vote also brought successes for the right in the 155-person Chamber of Deputies. Kast’s Partido Republicano gained 20 seats, and his Cambio por Chile coalition became the second largest bloc with 42 deputies. In the process, it overtook the traditional right parties’ coalition, which shrank from 53 deputies in 2021 to 34 now. While the left coalition is still the largest single bloc with 61 deputies, it will be ranged against a right that is larger overall and moving rapidly further to the right, whatever the outcome on 14 December. A Kast victory next weekend would represent more than a defeat for the left; it would also add Chile to the list of places where traditional conservative parties have been outflanked by more uncompromising, insurgent reactionary forces, adding to the far right’s seemingly inexorable region-wide momentum.

The shift in Chile’s political climate since the massive popular mobilizations of 2019–20 has been dramatic. What began as protests against increased transport fares rapidly escalated into a broader revolt against the entire post-dictatorship socio-economic and political order – hence the slogan ‘No son 30 pesos, son 30 años’ (‘It’s not 30 pesos, it’s 30 years’). A broad consensus emerged in favour of writing a new constitution, and in 2021 Boric, standing as the respectable face of the estallido social, beat Kast to the presidency by 12 percentage points. Yet the optimism that accompanied these events quickly dissipated, the sense of momentum stalled within months by the resounding rejection of a sweepingly progressive draft constitution in a September 2022 referendum. The following year, a new assembly dominated by the right produced a much more conservative document – but that too was rejected by popular vote, leaving the Pinochet-era charter in place.

While the constitutional impasse might seem to suggest a stalemate, the 2025 elections have made clear how far the political landscape has tilted to the right in the last few years. Three out of eight candidates in November’s first round were considerably to the right of centre: besides Kast himself, there was the far-right libertarian influencer Johannes Kaiser Barents-von Hohenhagen, who scored 14 per cent, and Evelyn Matthei of the Unión Democrática Independiente (UDI), a party founded by the Pinochet regime, who got 12 per cent. If we add their totals to Kast’s, the right secured over 50 per cent of the vote – almost double Jara’s total.

Polls currently put Kast on 58 per cent to Jara’s 42. Both Kaiser and Matthei quickly endorsed him, and if their voters follow suit in the second round, he will cruise to victory. Kaiser’s voters are overwhelmingly likely to do so, while polls suggest 60 per cent of Matthei’s supporters will vote for Kast and 18 per cent are undecided. Beyond the improbable feat of drawing large numbers of hard-right voters to the left, Jara’s main hope rests in rallying the rest of the electorate to her side. This, too, seems unlikely. The main surprise of the first round was the strong third-place showing by Franco Parisi, who won 20 per cent of the vote. Pitching himself as an outsider candidate – which is true in a literal sense: he is based in the US – Parisi claimed to offer voters an exit from the tired polarities of the establishment parties; as he put it, he is ‘ni facho ni comunacho’ (‘neither a fash nor a Commie’). Less clear is where his voters lean ideologically, and how they will vote in the second round; current polls show 37 per cent of them backing Kast, 22 per cent preferring Jara and 41 per cent undecided. Jara may be able to woo some of this latter group, but mathematically, she would need all of Parisi’s votes to even run Kast close.

This is Chile’s first presidential contest with obligatory voting, and in the first round it raised turnout to 85 per cent, its highest level since 1989. Parisi seems to have been one of the main beneficiaries; he seems to have done especially well among voters who abstained or cast a blank vote in 2021. Kast also did well among first- and second-time voters: a third of those aged 18–24 voted for him. Jara’s supporters were generally older: more than half of voters over 60 backed her, compared to less than 10 per cent for Kast, and 35 per cent of those aged 45–59 voted for Jara compared to 15 per cent for Kast.

In regional terms, the first round brought forth some significant differences. The north of the country, from Arica to Atacama, went strongly for Parisi; though their mines account for a significant chunk of GDP, taken together these regions comprise less than 8 per cent of the electorate. Jara’s strongest showing came in the Santiago Metropolitan Area, home to almost two-fifths of voters, where she won 31 per cent – some 1.5 million votes out of her total of 3.5 million. She also outperformed her national vote share in the central regions of Valparaiso and Coquimbo, as well as in the thinly populated far south of the country. Kast did best in the regions to the south of the capital, from Bernardo O’Higgins to Los Lagos, achieving his highest score of 33 per cent in Araucanía; taken together, these regions gave him some 1.3 million votes out of his total of just over 3 million. Even in regions where he finished second, Kast’s totals were sizeable – he got more than 1 million votes in Santiago, for example – and if he draws enough of either Kaiser’s or Matthei’s supporters in the second round, let alone both, he will outdo Jara across the map.

While disappointing, Jara’s first-round performance can scarcely be counted a surprise: her 27 per cent score was broadly in line with the polls. Born in 1974, Jara grew up in the working-class comuna of Conchalí, on the northern outskirts of Santiago, and joined the PC at the age of 14. During the transition back to democracy she became prominently involved in student politics, winning elections to the leadership of Feusach, the Santiago University students’ federation, in 1996. After training as a lawyer, she worked on welfare issues in 2016–18, during Michelle Bachelet’s second administration. It was on the basis of this experience that Boric tapped her to run the Ministry of Labour and Social Security. She has been one of the more popular and respected members of Boric’s cabinet, overseeing a rise in the minimum wage, a shortening of the working week to 40 hours and, earlier this year, a pension reform intended to address some of the imbalances of Chile’s privatized system. She won the left coalition’s primary in June by a crushing margin, with 60 per cent of the vote to her nearest opponent’s 28, and she initially polled in the 35-40 per cent range among voters as a whole. But over the following months her numbers tailed off.

It seems likely that Jara being from the Communist Party played some role in many voters’ reluctance to support her. Only 63 per cent of those who voted for Boric in 2021 backed her in the first round this time, suggesting hesitancy even within the left coalition. But two other factors were more important than anti-communism in weakening Jara’s candidacy. One was the generalized mood of anti-incumbency, visible across much of the world in recent years and reflected in the strong performance of ‘outsider’ candidates, from Milei to Parisi. In Chile, the collapse of the progressive constitutional project hamstrung the Boric administration from early on, pushing it to moderate its ambitions even as it lost political momentum.

The second major factor fuelling discontent has been the dominance of crime and immigration on the political agenda. Chile is by no means a dangerous country, especially by regional standards; but crime has risen markedly – though still low, homicide rates have doubled in the last decade – and the perception of a crisis around ‘security’ is widespread. This has always been more fertile terrain for the right than the left, especially when the left is in power, and Chile is no exception. As elsewhere, the right has also worked to connect crime to rising immigration. At the last count, Chile had 1.9 million foreign-born residents, out of a total population of around 20 million; the vast majority of these have official papers, but an estimated 337,000 are undocumented. Numbers have indeed surged in recent years, and although Chile has received fewer Venezuelans than many other countries in absolute terms, they now form close to two-fifths of its total migrant population – a visible target for xenophobic discourse.

Anti-migrant sentiment has certainly been a prominent part of Kast’s politics. His plans to build a wall along Chile’s northern border are a glaringly obvious tribute to Trump, and in addition to calling on undocumented migrants to ‘self-deport’, he has insisted that those with Chilean-born children should have to choose between taking their children with them or leaving them as wards of the state. Other components of his electoral platform also closely echo the themes of the region’s rising new right, from an emphasis on traditional family values – Kast is known for his opposition to abortion; he has nine children – to his promise to step up the use of force to combat narco-trafficking. The sense of existential urgency is also shared with his new-right peers: Kast’s platform speaks insistently of national crises and emergencies, of the need to act now before the radical left destroys the country’s social fabric. But in Chile as elsewhere in Latin America, the new right’s programme is in large part a revival of an older agenda. In Kast’s case, it derives from a balefully familiar source: the hard neoliberalism of the Pinochet dictatorship.

Born in 1966, Kast is one of ten children of Michael Kast, a former Nazi party member who escaped US custody after the Second World War and arrived in Chile in 1950. Kast’s eldest brother, also named Michael, was a prodigy of Chile’s forced transition to neoliberalism: one of the Chicago Boys, he served as Labour Minister and, at the age of 33, as head of the central bank under Pinochet, until his death from cancer in 1983. Too young to be politically active during the 1970s, José Antonio Kast came to politics in the late 1980s, as the junta’s hold on power was increasingly being contested. From early on, his career was dedicated to defending the dictatorship’s record: in 1988, he appeared on TV alongside other student leaders to argue for a ‘Yes’ vote in a referendum on whether Pinochet should continue in power. (The ‘No’ camp won by 56 to 44 per cent, obliging the junta to call democratic elections in 1989.)

A devout Catholic, Kast was formed politically by the Movimiento Gremial (literally ‘guild movement’), founded in 1967 by legal scholar and Opus Dei member Jaime Guzmán, later to serve as the éminence grise of Pinochet’s dictatorship and architect of the 1980 Constitution. Designed initially to offer a conservative counter to student radicalism, gremialismo became the intellectual nursery of the Chilean hard right, and many of its core ideas remain central to Kast’s thinking. Foremost among them is the concept of the ‘subsidiary state’, drawn from conservative Catholic political thought, according to which the state can only intervene in areas where civil society or private initiative are unwilling or unable to. For Guzmán, any active role the state took beyond this minimum was an illegitimate infringement of natural rights given by God, including of course the right to property. This also distinguished gremialismo from right-wing corporatist thought or even the developmentalism of the early Brazilian dictatorship, say; the whole point was to banish the state from its shaping role in politics and society.

A second key principle of Guzmán’s was that of ‘protected democracy’. In his eyes, Allende’s government represented the nefarious end-point of a longer trajectory of state intervention, and for Guzmán, the function of the Pinochet regime was to unravel the entire political order that had made Allende’s rise possible. Only when democracy had been made safe from such threats – Article 8 of the 1980 Constitution banned organizations and parties advocating ‘a concept of society, the State or the juridical order, of a totalitarian character or based on class warfare’ – could elections be restored.

Kast studied under Guzmán at the Catholic University of Chile, and it was Guzmán who encouraged him to join the UDI. Kast entered politics in 1996 as a local councillor in the south of Greater Santiago, and from 2001 to 2014 served as a congressional deputy. Opposition to abortion and defending the dictatorship were the core of his ideology for much of this period, and he appealed mainly to Pinochet nostalgists during his first presidential run in 2017, winning 8 per cent of the vote as an independent. He had broken with the UDI the year before over what he saw as its increasing moderation, claiming it had been pulled to the centre by the long success of the Concertación governments. The UDI has not exactly shed its link to the dictatorship even now: Evelyn Matthei’s father was a core member of the junta in the 1970s. But Kast has posed as the true defender of Guzmán’s legacy, and has consistently sought to outflank the UDI to the right, founding his Partido Republicano in 2019.

The crumbling of the traditional right has been a crucial enabling condition for Latin America’s new right as a whole, and it has been central to Kast’s rise too. In 2021, the UDI opted to tack towards the centre, but the candidate of its coalition finished a poor fourth; it was Kast who won the first round, capitalizing on the class anxieties stirred up by the estallido social. That time, the taint of association with the dictatorship and Boric’s positive programme for redistribution were enough to draw voters away from Kast. This time, Kast was not even the most right-wing candidate; that role was taken by Kaiser, himself a former member of Kast’s party who left it last year to form the Partido Nacional Libertario. Kaiser eagerly labels himself a ‘reactionary’, calling for a ‘cultural battle’ against progressive values and saying he would ‘absolutely, without a doubt’ support a second iteration of the 1973 coup. Compared to this, Kast seems moderate for bothering with elections at all; but compared to Matthei, he also seems to stand more steadfastly by the hard right’s principles.

Kast’s 2025 electoral platform makes no overt references to the dictatorship, pitching itself more as a patriotic rallying call to address various crises besetting Chile – rising insecurity and crime, economic stagnation, poverty, fading of traditional values, low birth rates. But threaded through the prescriptions it offers is a persistent attack on the state that echoes Guzmán’s ideas, depicting it now as overreaching and suffocating business, now as bloated and ineffective; but above all as being involved in places where it shouldn’t be, through welfare benefits, subsidies, debt relief and so on. ‘Instead of being an engine of development and a support for people and for families,’ it argues, the state ‘has been transformed into a big obstacle, trapped in its own bureaucracy, in its regulatory obsession and in out-of-control public spending’; it has ‘abandoned its mission of safeguarding order and security’. It’s not hard to imagine what this would mean if Kast were in power. He has already called for $6 billion worth of cuts to state spending, and although he hasn’t specified where they would fall, given the rest of his agenda it seems clear they would leave only policing and immigration enforcement untouched.

The traditional right-wing emphasis on law and order has an additional valence in today’s Chile, signifying not only the usual kind of crackdown but also a restoration of political order after the long fallout of the estallido social. After the first round on 16 November, Kast announced that ‘this time Chile did awaken’ – implying that the broad mobilizations of the previous years were a false dawn. Another Guzmanian leitmotif of Kast’s platform is the idea that the left has divided the population through ‘permanent conflict’ and a ‘logic of confrontation’, falsely sundering a national whole made up not of classes but of people. Yet if Guzmán’s original solution to this involved smashing the pre-1973 order, Kast doesn’t need to propose anything so drastic – after all, a radical overhaul of the constitution was fended off in 2022; the dictatorship’s charter is still in force.

Boric’s ascent signalled a challenge from the left to the Concertación coalition that dominated the country in the 1990s and 2000s, rooted in a rejection of Chile’s post-dictatorship model as a whole. The current political cycle has brought a revanchist right-wing surge, seeking to impose a harsher version of that same model. In 2021, Boric said Chile had been the cradle of neoliberalism, and would now be its grave. With Kast poised to take the presidency, it seems Chile has been unable to lay it to rest after all, and that it has emerged with renewed energy from its unquiet tomb.

Read on: Camila Vergara, ‘The Battle for Chile’s Constitution’, NLR 135.