José Antonio Kast’s resounding victory in Chile’s runoff election last December is bound to have a profound influence on the country. Two radical variants of Pinochetism—one led by Kast and another, even more extreme, led by Johannes Kaiser—converged to form a solid neofascist force, joined by the standard-bearer of a political fiction called the “democratic right,” embodied by the former mayor of the Santiago district of Providencia, Evelyn Matthei, the supposed political heir to conservative president Sebastián Piñera.
According to Chilean political analyst Jaime Lorca, compulsory voting—previously optional in Chile—channeled social discontent with Gabriel Boric’s government toward Pinochetism and its allies. Keep in mind that Boric’s approval ratings in the second half of his term hovered around a meager 30 percent. Issues such as insecurity, Trump-style hatred of immigrants (especially Venezuelans), and inflation—close to 4 percent annually—were stirred up demagogically by Kast, a man as careless with figures and statistics as Javier Milei. In an attempt to convince voters of the catastrophic dimensions of insecurity, Kast went so far as to say, in his debate with the ruling-coalition candidate Jeannete Jara, that in Chile, “1,200,000 people are murdered every year.” When he realized his mistake, he then spoke of 1.2 billion people murdered in Chile, whose total population is 19 million. The actual figure for 2024 was 1,207 homicides, a rate of 6.0 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, a figure comparable to that of the United States and slightly higher than that of Argentina.
Despite this, the mainstream media on both sides of the Andes exaggerate social insecurity, in order to use fear to attract votes to fascist parties and organizations in both countries. Blunders of this kind were common in Kast’s campaign but—again as in Argentina—in Chile a large sector of the electorate votes only out of legal obligation. This is a public which is not interested in politics at all, and is not bothered by the nonsense a candidate may utter. (This may also account for the surprising number of votes won in the first electoral round by the centrist Partido de la Gente, led by Franco Parisi, which scraped together 20 percent of the vote, just four percentage points behind Kast.) A large part of this electoral turnout—85 percent of the registered voters—was made up of new voters deeply influenced by the ideology of anti-politics, hyper-individualism, and contempt for anything that smacks of collective action, and in the runoff they leaned toward Kast. Some, perhaps, threw aside the deep-rooted anticommunism that prevails in Chile and supported Jara’s candidacy, but not to the extent necessary to prevent a catastrophic defeat.
What can we expect from a government headed by a fascist like Kast? Brutal cuts in social spending, a reevaluation of the progress made on women’s rights, and a redefinition of Chile’s international alliances. Kast will surely try to deepen the economic model developed during the Pinochet dictatorship, the foundations of which remained untouched by Chile’s long and unfinished democratic transition. Unfinished because the power relations and concentration of wealth that emerged after the fateful day of September 11, 1973, far from being reversed by the exercise of democracy, were consolidated and reinforced by successive governing coalitions. In the context of the new US national security doctrine, Kast will be pressured by Washington to undertake the arduous task of cooling his country’s warm relations with China; but the Asiatic giant is Chile’s largest trading partner, with which a key free trade agreement was signed in 2005.
On the other hand, the composition of the Chilean parliament could be a significant check on Kast’s foreseeable excesses. The Senate is divided equally in two halves, and it would be extremely difficult for Kast to obtain the four-sevenths of votes (57 percent) needed to reform the Constitution in the Chamber of Deputies. In any case, the formation of a government of this type represents an enormous challenge for the soon-to-be-defunct Frente Amplio (Broad Front) and for the extremely heterogenous progressive camp in general. As in Argentina after Milei’s victory, these forces face a fundamental challenge: redefining a global project for the country, devising a new narrative, designing a concrete agenda for government, revitalizing grassroots organizations, mobilizing their members, and resolving the always thorny issue of political direction and leadership.
These are urgent tasks that cannot be postponed, because any delay will help create the historical and structural conditions for the relaunch of a long-lasting neofascist political cycle that will cause serious harm to the Chilean population. Yet it would be a crucial mistake to give in to pessimism and believe that December’s defeat is definitive. However, such a resounding setback requires an effort of self-criticism that, among other things, realizes that the formula of “light progressivism” that invites people to advance politically along an illusory “wide middle avenue,” equidistant from the left and right, only serves to produce further frustrations and throw open the doors of the democratic state to the extreme right or to colonial neofascism. In times as immoderate as these, marked by a profound capitalist crisis and the imperialist offensive, and with the brutal Trump Doctrine hanging over our heads, moderation, far from being a virtue, becomes an unforgivable vice.