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Supporters of Jose Antonio Kast, presidential candidate of the opposition Republican Party, celebrate preliminary results after polls closed for a presidential runoff election in Santiago, Chile, on Sunday.Esteban Felix/The Associated Press
Jose Antonio Kast won Chile’s presidential election on Sunday, leveraging voter fears over rising crime and migration to steer the country in its sharpest rightward shift since the end of the military dictatorship in 1990.
Kast secured 58.30 per cent of the vote in a runoff with leftist candidate Jeannette Jara, who was at 41.70 per cent, with more than 95 per cent of the ballots counted. “Democracy has spoken loud and clear,” Jara said as she conceded. “I have communicated with Jose Antonio Kast and wished him success for the good of Chile.” Kast has been a consistent right-wing hardliner throughout his decades-long political career. He has proposed building border walls, deploying the military to high-crime areas, and deporting all migrants in the country illegally.
His victory marks the latest win for the resurgent right in Latin America. He joins Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, and Argentina’s Javier Milei. In October, the election of centrist Rodrigo Paz ended almost two decades of socialist rule in Bolivia. The campaign was Kast’s third run at the presidency and second runoff, after losing to leftist President Gabriel Boric in 2021. Once seen by many Chileans as too extreme, he has attracted voters who have become increasingly concerned by crime and immigration. Supporters arrived at the Kast campaign headquarters in Santiago on Sunday evening, waving Chile flags. Some wore red caps emblazoned “Make Chile Great Again.”
Ignacio Segovia, a 23-year-old engineering student, was among them.
“I grew up in a peaceful Chile where you could go out in the street, you had no worry, you went out and you never had problems or fear,” he said. “Now you can’t go out peacefully.”
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A man holds his dog as he votes during the presidential runoff election in Santiago, Chile, on Sunday.Rodrigo Garrido/Reuters
While Chile remains one of the safest countries in Latin America, violent crime has spiked in recent years as organized crime groups have taken root, capitalizing on the country’s porous northern desert borders with coca-producing neighbours Peru and Bolivia, major international marine ports, and surge of migrants susceptible to human and sex trafficking.
The vast majority of migrants in Chile illegally have arrived from Venezuela in recent years, government data shows. Kast’s proposals include creating a police force inspired by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to rapidly detain and expel migrants in the country illegally.
He has also touted massive cuts in public spending. However, Kast’s more radical proposals are likely to face pushback from a divided Congress. While right-wing parties won seats in both legislative houses in a November general election, most of those gains came from more traditional parties. The Senate is evenly split between left and right-wing parties, while the swing vote in the lower legislative body belongs to the populist People’s Party.
Chile is the world’s largest copper producer and a major producer of lithium, and expectations of less regulation and market-friendly policies have already buoyed the local stock market, peso and equity benchmark. Kast has previously been outspoken against abortion and the morning-after pill, but changing the country’s abortion laws would require the support of more than half of the Congress to pass.
