On 15 December 2025, Chile elected José Antonio Kast as its next president, delivering a decisive victory to the far right and marking one of the most dramatic ideological shifts since the country’s return to democracy in 1990.
On 15 December 2025, Chile elected José Antonio Kast as its next president, delivering a decisive victory to the far right and marking one of the most dramatic ideological shifts since the country’s return to democracy in 1990. Facing him in the runoff was Jeannette Jara, a former labour minister and Communist Party candidate backed by the governing left. The contest was stark, polarised, and emotionally charged, cutting to the heart of competing visions for Chile’s future. At stake was not only who would govern, but what kind of country Chile is becoming, and what its voters now fear most.
For decades, Chile has occupied a distinctive place in Latin America: a democratic republic of around 20 million people, lauded for its political stability, open economy, and relatively strong institutions. Long held up as a regional success story, it combined market-oriented growth with gradual social reform, even as inequality persisted beneath the surface. Yet by the time voters returned to the polls in December, this image had frayed. Rising concern over violent crime, irregular migration, and economic insecurity had reshaped the national mood, pushing debates over social justice and redistribution into the background. Migration became a lightning rod. The authorised migrant population has more than doubled over the past decade, reaching close to 9 per cent of residents, driven largely by arrivals from Venezuela and other crisis-hit states. Although Chile’s crime rates remain lower than many regional neighbours, public perceptions of insecurity have intensified, and it was these perceptions, rather than statistics alone, that came to dominate the election.
Jeannette Jara entered the race as the candidate of continuity. A lawyer by training, she served as Minister of Labour and Social Provision under President Gabriel Boric and emerged as the standard-bearer for the Unidad por Chile coalition after winning a commanding primary victory. Her campaign promised to deepen the social agenda launched after the 2019 protests: higher wages, stronger labour protections, expanded public services, and greater economic security for working families. On crime and migration, she sought a careful balance, advocating increased police capacity and prevention strategies while resisting the punitive rhetoric that had come to define the right. Her platform also proposed temporary biometric registration for migrants and labour integration measures, reflecting an attempt to respond to public unease without abandoning inclusive principles.
But Jara’s message struggled to gain traction in a political climate increasingly shaped by fear and fatigue. For many voters, she was inseparable from an unpopular governing coalition seen as ineffective on security and slow to deliver tangible improvements to daily life. Her Communist Party affiliation, though moderated by coalition politics, proved a liability among centrist and undecided voters. In the runoff, she secured roughly 42 per cent of the vote, a decisive loss that underscored how sharply voter priorities had shifted away from social reform and toward order, control, and enforcement.
José Antonio Kast offered precisely that. A long-standing figure on Chile’s conservative right and leader of the Republican Party, Kast built his campaign around an uncompromising law-and-order agenda. He promised harsher sentencing, expanded high-security prisons, mass deportations of irregular migrants, and a dramatic tightening of borders. Economically, he advocated deregulation, tax cuts, and a rollback of what he portrayed as excessive state intervention. Socially, he positioned himself as a defender of traditional values, opposing abortion and same-sex marriage, and he has previously expressed admiration for aspects of the Pinochet dictatorship, a stance that would once have been electorally toxic, but which now failed to prevent his victory. Winning approximately 58 per cent of the vote, Kast became the first openly Pinochet-sympathetic figure to assume the presidency in Chile’s democratic era.
The campaign itself mirrored the country’s growing polarisation. An initially crowded field quickly narrowed to a binary choice between Jara and Kast after the first round in November failed to produce a majority winner. From that point on, rallies, debates, and media coverage revolved almost exclusively around crime and migration. Kast’s mass events, styled deliberately on international populist campaigns, contrasted with Jara’s appeals to collective solidarity and social protection. A televised debate in early December, watched by millions, crystallised the divide: punishment versus prevention, exclusion versus integration. Mandatory voting drove turnout up, but it did not bridge the gap between competing visions of Chile, it simply revealed how decisively one had come to dominate.
As Kast prepares to take office in March 2026, Chile stands at a crossroads. His government is expected to move swiftly on security and immigration, translating campaign rhetoric into policy. Yet his ability to do so will be constrained by Congress, where his party lacks an outright majority, and by institutions shaped by decades of democratic consensus. The economic agenda he proposes, spending cuts, tax reforms, and investor-friendly policies, will test social cohesion in a country still marked by inequality and the unfulfilled promises of the post-2019 reform era. Internationally, Chile is unlikely to abandon its pragmatic trade relationships, but its political identity is shifting in ways that will resonate far beyond its borders.
The 2025 election was not simply a rejection of the left, nor an endorsement of authoritarian nostalgia. It reflected a society gripped by anxiety, distrustful of gradual reform, and increasingly willing to trade social ambition for a promise of order. Whether that promise can be fulfilled, and at what cost, will determine whether this election proves a turning point, or merely the beginning of a deeper reckoning in Chilean politics.