By Jesús Rojas
“A desperate urge to cry, to cry out in rebellion.” That is how many Chileans describe the morning after José Antonio Kast’s crushing victory in Sunday’s presidential runoff. It is not simply the pain of electoral defeat that lingers, but the weight of history pressing back into the present. Thirty-five years after Chile restored democracy, a self-declared admirer of Augusto Pinochet has reached the presidency for the first time since the dictatorship ended in 1990.
Kast’s triumph is not only political; it is deeply symbolic. It signals a rupture with the post-dictatorship consensus and the return of an authoritarian imagination that many believed had been permanently buried. And Kast does not arrive alone. He comes armed with a mandate and a familiar playbook borrowed from the global hard right.
On security and public order, Kast channels the performative “iron fist” of El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. On culture and nationalism, he echoes Donald Trump’s law-and-order populism. On economics, he flirts with the radical anti-statism popularized by Argentina’s Javier Milei. The synthesis of these influences is not abstract. It translates into concrete proposals, none more emblematic than his promise of mass expulsions of undocumented migrants.
This policy, touted as a solution to insecurity, is riddled with logistical, legal, and moral contradictions. Deportations on the scale Kast proposes would require years of legal proceedings, costly charter flights, and an expanded coercive apparatus yet they are sold primarily as spectacle. The message matters more than the mechanics. It is a politics of force over rights, one that risks tearing apart families with Chilean-born children and normalizing collective punishment in the name of order.
Kast’s victory is best understood as a symptom of deep and unresolved discontent. He succeeded not because of a detailed or coherent governing program, but because he became a vessel for frustration. Violence, inflation, and a perceived migration crisis created fertile ground for a candidate who promised certainty in a time of anxiety. In the runoff, he consolidated the right by absorbing the support of libertarian Johannes Kaiser and conservative Evelyn Matthei. But his real strength lay elsewhere: among voters who were less enthusiastic than exhausted, less ideological than desperate for a break from the current political cycle.
There is also a darker undercurrent that cannot be ignored. Kast’s migration discourse carries a racialized logic that mirrors that of his international idols. Today’s migrant population in Chile largely comes from neighboring countries with strong Afro-descendant and Indigenous roots not from Europe, like the president-elect’s own ancestry. This contrast exposes the selective nature of the outrage. Migration becomes not a policy challenge but a convenient scapegoat, a way to transform social fear into political capital.
Chile wakes up today more fractured than it has been in decades. Kast did not merely win an election; he crystallized a polarization that now defines the national mood. His presidency promises to be a large-scale experiment in applying the recipes of the contemporary far right within one of Latin America’s most institutionally robust democracies.
The question reverberating beyond Chile’s borders is whether the so-called “Bukele effect” can truly be replicated in a country with strong institutions, an active press, and a vigorous civil society or whether those same forces will collide head-on with an authoritarian project dressed in democratic legitimacy. For now, what remains is a bitter aftertaste, and for many Chileans, the sense that this defeat is not just political, but historic.
