Kast wins

CHILE - In Brief 15 Dec 2025 by Robert Funk

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Many observers ask how it is that a country that six years ago was marching on the streets and four years ago elected a young leftist firebrand has now elected a conservative with a record of supporting the Pinochet dictatorship. One possible answer lies in the rejection of a highly unpopular and ineffective government. Another is that Chileans were never going to elect a Communist. There is some truth to both of these (although Jeannette Jara did get 4.2 million votes). But the real answer probably lies precisely in the path Chile has taken since October 2019, and especially the left’s role in that path, from its silent complacency with violence to the extreme constitutional proposal of 2022 to Gabriel Boric’s inefficient and unpopular government. Chile's left has miscalculated over and over again. The first sign of this was the 2022 constitutional referendum, when 62% of voters rejected the proposal, while 38% supported it. Fast forward to Sunday’s election and a similar breakdown emerges, with 58% supporting José Antonio Kast and 42% of voters opting for Jeannette Jara. With the introduction of mandatory voting and automatic voter registration, and corresponding expansion of the electorate, Kast becomes the president-elect with the largest number of votes in the country’s history. So what can we expect in the near term? The next couple of months will center on the transition, which involves a lot of contact between outgoing and incoming officials. The public side of this, of course, is the designation of cabinet and other high level personnel. The names will provide the best indicators of the direction the Kast government is likely to take, at least in its initial s...