Chile inaugurates José Antonio Kast as its most right-wing president in decades

Chile has sworn in José Antonio Kast as its new president, completing a political shift that few observers considered likely just four years ago when Gabriel Boric won the presidency on a left-wing platform and Chile seemed to be moving toward a new constitutional order. Kast defeated the center-left candidate Jeannette Jara in the December 2025 runoff by a margin of 54 to 46 percent, a result that was more decisive than pre-election polling had suggested.

Kast is 59 years old and has been in Chilean politics since 2002, when he was first elected to the Chamber of Deputies representing the UDI party. He broke from the traditional right in 2019 to found the Republican Party, a harder-edged conservative movement that positioned itself well to the right of the established center-right coalition that had governed Chile for much of the post-Pinochet era. His political style draws more from the Jair Bolsonaro and Milei playbooks than from Chile's older conservative establishment.

What Kast actually campaigned on

Kast's campaign focused on three concrete policy areas. He promised strict controls on immigration, particularly through the northern border crossings where Venezuela, Colombia, and Haiti-origin migration has surged since 2019. He ran on restoring public order after years of protests, crime increases in Santiago and Valparaiso, and the Araucania conflict with Mapuche indigenous communities in southern Chile. His third major platform was economic deregulation, including reducing corporate tax rates that Boric had raised and rolling back pension system reforms.

Immigration was arguably the issue that moved the most votes. According to Chile's National Statistics Institute, the country's foreign-born population grew from roughly 400,000 in 2015 to over 1.8 million by 2023, a fourfold increase in eight years in a country of 19 million people. Crime statistics tracked by the Subsecretariat of Crime Prevention showed a 34 percent increase in reported violent crimes between 2019 and 2024. Kast tied those two trends together explicitly throughout the campaign, and polling by Cadem found that security and immigration ranked as the top two concerns for Chilean voters in each of the six months before the election.

The Boric years and why the left lost

Gabriel Boric entered office in March 2022 with 56 percent of the vote and an ambitious program that included a new constitution, expanded social spending, increased mining taxes, and pension reform. By the end of his term, his approval rating had fallen to 26 percent, according to the Adimark polling firm. The new constitution he championed was rejected by 62 percent of voters in the September 2022 referendum, a defeat that defined the rest of his presidency.

Boric's government did pass some reforms. It raised the minimum wage by 17 percent in real terms between 2022 and 2025, expanded subsidized childcare, and increased the base pension payment. But the constitutional failure, combined with persistent inflation in 2022 and 2023 and rising crime rates, gave his opponents a clear line of attack that proved effective. Kast's entire campaign argument was essentially that the Boric government's policy agenda had made Chileans less safe and less economically secure.

Kast's family history and the Pinochet question

No profile of Kast can avoid the Pinochet question. His father, Michael Kast Rieemann, was a German immigrant who became an economist and served in the Pinochet government in the 1970s and 1980s. His brother Miguel Kast was a close Pinochet ally who led the National Planning Office and helped implement the Chicago Boys' free-market reforms. José Antonio Kast has never fully repudiated Pinochet, saying in a 2021 interview that Pinochet's economic policies brought prosperity to Chile even if his human rights record was wrong.

That position draws fierce opposition from the Chilean left and from human rights organizations, who note that Pinochet's government was responsible for the torture and disappearance of at least 3,200 people according to the Valech Commission's findings. For Kast's supporters, his willingness to defend parts of the Pinochet legacy reads as honesty about Chile's economic history. For his opponents, it makes him unfit to govern a democracy.

What Kast can actually do with the legislature he has

Kast's Republican Party won 43 seats in the 155-seat Chamber of Deputies in the November 2025 legislative elections. The broader right-wing coalition, including the traditional UDI and RN parties that aligned with Kast for the runoff, controls approximately 78 seats combined, three short of a majority. That means Kast will need to negotiate with centrist parties on most legislation and cannot pass major structural reforms without coalition partners who have different priorities.

His most politically feasible early moves are likely to be immigration enforcement measures, which can be implemented through executive action and existing law without new legislation, and budget adjustments that roll back some of Boric's spending increases. Pension reform and constitutional changes require supermajorities that Kast's coalition cannot reach on its own, which limits his ability to deliver on some of his larger campaign commitments in the near term.

How Chile's neighbors are reading the result

Latin America's political leaders reacted along predictable lines. Argentine President Javier Milei attended the inauguration in Santiago and described Kast as a fellow fighter for freedom against socialism, the same framing Milei uses for his own government. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva sent a formal congratulatory message but did not attend. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro did not acknowledge the inauguration publicly.

The result adds Chile to a list of Latin American countries that have elected right-wing governments in recent years, including Argentina under Milei, Paraguay under Santiago Peña, and Ecuador under Daniel Noboa. The left still governs Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Bolivia, so the region remains genuinely divided rather than swinging uniformly in one direction. Chile's specific combination of a high immigration intake, rising crime, and a failed constitutional referendum created conditions that may not replicate easily elsewhere in the region.

Kast's first cabinet appointments, announced two days before the inauguration, included Axel Kaiser as Finance Minister. Kaiser is a libertarian economist and author who has been one of Chile's most prominent critics of redistribution policies since 2010. His appointment signals that Kast intends to move on the economic agenda quickly, with the proposed corporate tax rate reduction from 27 percent to 20 percent listed as the first legislative priority for the new government's first 100 days.