Chileans have elected the most right-wing presidential candidate because the finish of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship over three and a half many years in the past.
In a runoff held on Dec. 14, 2025, José Antonio Kast, a Republican Get together ex-congressman and two-time former presidential candidate, received just over 58% of the vote, whereas his opponent, Jeannette Jara, the left-wing labor minister of present President Gabriel Boric, received practically 42%.
Roughly 15.6 million Chileans had been eligible to vote within the first presidential election to happen with obligatory voting and computerized voter registration.
Because of these new election guidelines, which went into place in 2022, an estimated 5 million to 6 million new voters went to the polls. These voters – discovered to be largely youthful, male and lower-middle class – are seen as lacking a strong ideological identity and rejecting politics altogether.
The decision delivered by Chile’s voters places it in step with a broader right-wing regional shift – most recently in Bolivia – that has reversed the “pink tide” of left-leaning governments prior to now 20 years. However as a historian of modern Latin America and Chile, I consider Chile’s election additionally displays the necessary native context of years of accelerating disenchantment with the political system.
Amid Chile’s expanded voters, the first problems with voter concern throughout this marketing campaign had been crime and immigration. An October 2025 poll particularly discovered delinquency to be the highest difficulty, with immigration, unemployment and well being care additionally marking excessive.
AP Photo / Natacha Pisarenko
Although Chile has one of many lowest crime charges in Latin America, high-profile cases of organized crime have shaken the nation lately. Homicides increased between 2018 and 2022 and have decreased slightly since then. Immigration has additionally risen considerably, with numerous immigrants coming to Chile having fled financial and political crises in Venezuela, as well as in Peru, Haiti, Colombia and Bolivia. The foreign-born inhabitants in Chile rose from 4.4% in 2017 to 8.8% in 2024.
The important thing constitutional context
Many commentators have highlighted the stark polarization of this election, with a Communist Get together labor minister campaigning in opposition to the arch-conservative Kast, who has lauded the Pinochet dictatorship below which his deceased older brother as soon as served. However there’s extra to the story.
Some observers have drawn comparisons between Kast and different far-right Latin American leaders like Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Javier Milei in Argentina and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. However Chile isn’t merely following the identical far-right playbook of its neighbors.
Within the weeks main as much as the runoff in Chile, each candidates moved towards the middle. Jara vowed to increase the jail system to fight rising crime, whereas Kast – who had beforehand threatened expulsion of undocumented migrants – softened his tone to say they’d be “invited” to go away.
Furthermore, Kast learned from his previous failed attempts on the presidency by talking much less about his controversial or more socially conservative positions. For instance, he performed down opposition to abortion below any circumstances. Chilean voters, in distinction, overwhelmingly approve of the restricted abortion rights that had been handed by Congress in 2017.
But past the marketing campaign path messaging, the outcomes additionally replicate a structural reality of Chilean politics that mirror political realities of different components of Latin America, and even globally. In each presidential election since 2006, Chileans have voted out the incumbency to swing to the opposing aspect of the political spectrum. With candidates barred from consecutive presidential phrases, the pendulum has swung forwards and backwards because the alternating presidencies of socialist Michelle Bachelet – 2006-2010 and 2014-2018 — and conservative Sebastián Piñera – 2010-2014 and 2018-2022.
Eithan Ambramovich / AFP vis Getty Images
Boric, a former left-wing pupil chief, took workplace in 2022 following a wave of upheaval and common protests over inequality in 2019-2020. In what was a historic second, the nation voted to start a technique of rewriting its Pinochet-era structure, which entrenched neoliberal economic policies and restricted the federal government’s capability to confront inequality. The constitutional conference was made up of straight elected residents, lots of them from grassroots actions.
But in a shocking reversal, the progressive structure – which might have protected rights to nature, Indigenous rights and social rights – was roundly defeated in a plebiscite in 2022. Simply over a yr later, voters similarly rejected a second attempt to rewrite the structure, albeit below a course of that conservative events helped form.
Boric’s approval scores, already low, suffered from this failed constitutional course of. Greater than the right-wing elections elsewhere within the area, this nationwide context helps to elucidate Chile’s personal conservative flip.
The ever-present discontent of voters
Even because the pendulum has swung forwards and backwards in current Chilean presidential elections, there are deeper continuities throughout the completely different Chilean governments within the twenty first century. Essential amongst them is generalized voter discontent with the political system.
This has historically been expressed in common protests, equivalent to the scholar actions of 2006 and 2011 and the Estallido Social – or Social Rebellion – of 2019-2020 that had been the most important protests because the return to democracy in 1990 and helped propel Boric to energy. Public discontent was additionally expressed within the overwhelming vote to rewrite the structure, which handed with 78% of the vote in 2020.
AP Photo / Rodrigo Abd, File
Although the constitutional course of was in the end rejected by voters, this underlying discontent has not gone away.
One of many current indicators of discontent with the political selections on supply was within the first spherical of voting on Nov. 16: The third-place candidate was not one of many veteran politicians on the fitting, however Franco Parisi, a populist economist who has not set foot in Chile in years and who referred to as on his supporters to deliberately vote null – or “spoil” their votes. Discontent has taken many types – outrage about inequality and neoliberalism in 2019-2020, or unease about financial precarity and crime within the present election. But it surely has continued, at the same time as Chile’s political system stays secure.
Some observers have pointed out that, in contrast to in lots of locations world wide, Chile’s democratic norms are holding sturdy. The truth that energy continues to move peacefully regardless of main ideological variations is critical, notably in mild of the long struggle for democracy in the course of the Pinochet regime. Kast’s type, for what it’s value, isn’t as bombastic as that of U.S. President Donald Trump or Argentina’s Milei.
Nonetheless, his obvious politeness belies what many worry is a coming erosion of rights: the rights of women to bodily autonomy; the rights of individuals] to due course of; the rights of workers to dignified circumstances. These might be up for negotiation below the brand new administration.
Kast, a staunch Catholic and father of 9, is against abortion below any circumstances and has even attempted to ban the morning-after tablet. He was a supporter of Pinochet up till the regime’s finish, campaigning for the “sure” vote in 1988 that might have seen eight extra years for the authoritarian chief after 15 years already in energy. Kast has likewise vowed to slash public spending and decontrol the financial system, a clear echo of the Pinochet years.
Regardless of the momentous shift heralded by Kast’s election, although, it’s unlikely to alter one of many principal challenges of Chile’s democracy within the twenty first century: voter discontent and disenchantment. There was a constant pattern for the federal government in energy to lose common assist and face sturdy headwinds in Congress from the opposition. For all of the celebration occurring proper now for Kast and his supporters, it’s arduous to see that altering as soon as the brand new authorities takes workplace in March 2026.