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Extremist candidate José Antonio Kast seems best placed to take advantage of the fragmentation and shift to the right in Chilean politics
A few years ago, Cristopher Rojas would have been an unlikely political organiser. Today, he is a figure that will be instantly familiar to anyone following the rise of right-wing politics across the globe: a young, male TikToker from a working-class background who uses his platform to espouse far-right views on immigration to his tens of thousands of followers.
“In recent years, Chile has lost control of its borders. [Immigrants] were no longer just families in search of opportunities, but drug traffickers, criminals, criminal gangs… even hitmen,” 28-year-old Rojas says over dramatic music in one video.
“How much longer can Chile hold out?” he asks, reaching his punchline: “This is why we need the shield.”
The so-called ‘border shield’ is the flagship policy of José Antonio Kast, the far-right presidential candidate tipped to seize power at Chile’s election, the first round of which takes place on 16 November this year.
As is typical of the far-right populists gaining influence and power all over the world, Kast’s platform centres on immigration and a strongman heavy hand to deal with it. Taking inspiration from Donald Trump in the US, Kast’s ‘shield’ involves building a wall and digging trenches along Chile’s desert frontier with Bolivia and Peru, and introducing draconian measures to deter would-be irregular migrants.
As Rojas tells his 75,000 TikTok followers: “Those who enter illegally will be expelled, those who hire illegal immigrants will be punished, and those who protect our borders will be supported.”
A keen Kast supporter, Rojas primarily uses his social media platforms – he has a further 41,000 followers on Instagram – to spread his idol’s policy proposals and make jibes at the left. The young Chileans he hopes to attract to Kast’s cause are disenchanted with politics and pessimistic about the future, according to a body of research. Their apathy is in part a hangover from the social unrest that shook Chile in 2019, when millions took to the streets to express their dissatisfaction with the country’s direction.
While young, digitally savvy, online influencers such as Rojas are often the most visible supporters of this hard-right agenda, political scientists and Kast’s own advisers point to years of painstaking grassroots organising, strategic alliances with Christian groups, and a general shift to the right across Chilean society in the wake of country-wide protests in 2019.
An analysis of Chile’s shifting politics offers both an insight into conservatism and authoritarianism’s enduring appeal in times of social crisis, but also a playbook for how conservative movements are successfully building and consolidating power while the left is accused of being elitist and out of touch.
Hydroponic lettuce
A few years ago, political scientist Juan Pablo Luna famously described Chile’s political system as a ‘hydroponic lettuce’.
“From above, you see the lettuce; you see it in Congress and on TV. But underneath, there are no roots – it’s floating in water,” Luna said, explaining that the country’s main political parties are long-standing and well-known, but have little connection with Chilean society.
Kast and his Republican Party have sought to address this disconnect, but to understand how, we must rewind to the social unrest, which began in October 2019 in response to an increase in Santiago’s metro fares and spiralled into country-wide demonstrations over the high cost of living, unemployment and inequality.
It was these protests, which lasted months and led to the deaths of around 30 people, that sparked TikTok influencer Rojas’s interest in politics – and in Kast, in particular.
While Chile’s security forces were responsible for vast majority of violence recorded at the time, as Chile’s social and political mood has shifted to the right in recent years, the events’ retellings have increasingly focused on the vandalism and looting by protesters in working-class neighbourhoods. This is a trend familiar to those who have followed how right-wing narratives have sought to recast the 2020 George Floyd social justice demonstrations in the US as ‘lawless protests’.
“They burned our buses, our supermarkets; your whole daily life was surrounded by violence, and that makes you react,” Rojas told openDemocracy. “Very few dared to condemn the violence; José Antonio [Kast] was one of them. Now, everyone defends the Carabineros [the police] – even the Communist Party – but he did so when it was unpopular, when he was cornered on television panels and funado [named and shamed] in universities”.
This is the Republican Party’s ground zero. In 2019, when the vast majority of Chileans supported the protesters and the traditional political spectrum oscillated between silence and self-criticism, Kast condemned the demonstrations and defended their main target: the economic legacy of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.
Since then, there have been two failed attempts – one under Kast’s control – to reform Chile’s constitution, which was written by the Pinochet dictatorship in 1980. Other right-wing candidates have emerged, but Kast has best seized upon the fear and uncertainty that mark the national mood to become the main opposition figure.
Now, Chile faces a presidential election that is particularly difficult to call. As no candidate is forecast to win the more than 50% needed to secure an outright victory at the first round, a run-off between the top two candidates is expected to take place in December, which will likely see Jeannete Jara from the incumbent left-wing coalition government go head-to-head with a candidate from the right. While Kast appears best placed to capitalise on the current fluid political moment, whether he has done enough to prevail over his right-wing rivals is far from certain.
A winning chance?
This is Kast’s third attempt at the presidency.
In 2016, he split from the Independent Democratic Union, a rightwing party founded in 1983 by a Pinochet ally, claiming the party had strayed from its origins in Pinochetism. He ran the following year’s presidential election as an independent candidate with an ultra-conservative platform that appealed to nostalgic Pinochet supporters, but was knocked out at the first round after winning 8% of the vote.
By the 2021 election, the first to take place after the 2019 unrest, Kast had founded the Chilean Republican Party and widened his appeal. He prevailed over the coalition of centre-right parties to win the first round with almost 28% of the vote – far exceeding pollsters’ expectations. But he was seen as extremist, and there appeared to be a ceiling to his support that left him unable to win the run-off.
Gabriel Boric, a left-wing former student leader who understood the desire for social change, swept in and scooped up 56% of the vote.
Boric’s popularity has since tanked, and he is set to leave office with a disapproval rating of over 60%. He is also prevented from running again by a constitutional ban on consecutive presidential terms.
His ruling coalition surprised many by choosing Jeannete Jara of the Communist Party as its presidential candidate at the primaries, and she is now forecast to win the election’s first round with support that hovers around 30%.
But even the most optimistic poll for Jara does not predict a victory in the December run-off.
Instead, a combination of factors appears to give the right a clear advantage: general dissatisfaction with the government, Chile’s traditional anti-communism, and the fact that this is the first presidential election since mandatory voting was reinstated in 2022 due to a dwindling turnout. There are now five million new voters in the electorate, who appear not to identify with the traditional left-right axis and are more interested in conservative and traditionalist values than the average voter.
And Kast, who is currently polling in second place with just over 20% of the vote, no longer seems to face a limit to his support. He has cultivated a careful online persona in recent years and is said to have moderated his views to win over women and young people, two groups that rejected him in 2021. He no longer speaks out against abortion and ‘gender ideology’; instead, he has proposed a maternity bonus and sought to show himself surrounded by women.
A Kast adviser told openDemocracy that they believe his increase in popularity is largely due to a shift in the public’s perception of candidates on both sides of the political spectrum.
“The 2021 election was one of prejudices for and against,” the adviser explained. “The prejudice against José Antonio [Kast] was that he was ultra-conservative, far-right, fascist, Nazi. And there was also a prejudice in favour of Boric; a young, new, fresh cabro not involved in corruption and not representing the government.”
That’s no longer the case, they continued. “Today it’s ‘I know Kast, I’ve known him for 10 years; I didn’t vote for him because, chucha, he scared me,’” the adviser said, assuming the voice of an imaginary voter. “But that same guy is now unemployed, or he was mugged, or he saw how his priority in housing allocation was taken away because an immigrant came in.
“He already knows Boric, as he has governed, and he doesn’t want him anymore.”
Constitutional mourning and fear
To understand the discrediting of the left and the renewed prospects of the far right, we must go back to 4 September 2022, when 62% of voters rejected a proposed new constitution.
The proposal had been drawn up by various figures from the independent left, and its defeat plunged Chile’s entire left into pessimism. It was seen as the end of a push for social mobilisation that began with protests for free education in 2011 and intensified with the 2019 demonstrations. For Boric’s government, which had entered office months before the vote and backed the proposed constitution, its defeat marked the turning point at which it began shifting towards the centre ground.
Two years earlier, 80% of voters had backed constitutional reform, which had been put forward as an answer to the social unrest that had plagued the country in 2019. But while their discontent with the political system was clear, Chileans were also wary of what was being suggested should replace it.
The new constitution would have declared Chile a “plurinational” state like Bolivia and Ecuador, a term recognising the rights to land and resources of the Indigenous populations that make up about 13% of the country’s population. It also would have acknowledged the rights of other historically marginalised groups in Chile, such as women, sexual and gender minorities and people with disabilities.
The proposal was rejected following several scandals surrounding some of the left-wing constitutional delegates who’d drafted it, concerns over the way the drafting sessions had been held, and a fierce disinformation campaign from the right about what it really included.
At the same time, the public was increasingly worried by a perceived ‘security crisis’ involving foreign organised crime gangs, which was leading news bulletins due to a rise in homicides. While the homicide rate in Chile was still lower than in many other Latin American nations, its increase contributed to fears over other high-profile crimes committed by members of these gangs, such as the murders of police officers. The homicide rate has since fallen, but the feeling of insecurity remains, boosting the electoral chances of Kast and other right-wing candidates seen as tough on security and immigration.
Against this backdrop, Boric, with the agreement of the major political parties, led a second attempt at constitutional reform, which took place in 2023.
This time, voters elected an assembly dominated by Kast’s Republicans, the only party that had opposed changing the constitution, to lead the drafting of its replacement. However, that proposal was also rejected – this time with 55% of the vote – with the public viewing it as too conservative.
Kast, who had previously capitalised on discontent with the reform process, now fell victim to it.
In that moment of attrition, his deputy Johannes Kaiser broke with Kast. He went on to found the National Libertarian Party, and is now running for president on a platform that is even further to the right on immigration, security and the economy than that of his former mentor. If Kast proposes cutting public spending by $6bn (a proposal dismissed as unfeasible by economists), Kaiser calls for a cut of between $12bn and $15bn.
Kaiser’s extreme positions have helped Kast to be seen as a more serious and palatable option. “Compared to Kaiser, Kast looks like a statesman,” a government official recently told openDemocracy. Still, though, Kaiser’s presidential campaign has experienced a surge in popularity in recent weeks, with some polls putting him just a few points behind Kast, or even tied with him.
Meanwhile, the campaign of the more moderate right-wing candidate is floundering. The Independent Democratic Union’s Evelyn Matthei, a former mayor of a wealthy district of Santiago who has the support of most of the economic elite and mainstream media, was initially polling well but has lost momentum in recent months. She now ranks third or fourth in the polls, with some members of her centre-right coalition announcing that they will vote for Kast.
These movements illustrate the volatility and fragmentation of the Chilean political scene – and its shift to the right.
Grassroots coalitions
What sets Kast apart from other Chilean politicians is his focus on building grassroots support for his Republican Party.
“What he has done is build a more solid and better-developed party and territorial structure at the local level,” Luna, the political scientist, told openDemocracy. This distinguishes him from other forces on the right, but also on the left. “The Frente Amplio [Boric’s party] did not do this,” he added.
For Rojas, the TikTok influencer, it was these local efforts that won him over. The Republican Party has sought out young people like him through meetings in neighbourhoods like his – a strategy reminiscent of the Independent Democratic Union’s heyday, when it used its gremialismo tactic, which sought to appeal to more diverse constituencies beyond its core membership of young people from religious and wealthy backgrounds.
“It’s literally about going to the neighbourhoods and listening to the working-class communities; understanding that politics is not only experienced in Las Condes or Ñuñoa, but throughout the country, which is where the violence is,” Rojas said, referring to the affluent Santiago neighbourhoods known as the home of the centre-right economic elite and wealthy left-wing politicians, respectively.
Rojas believes these meetings have been instrumental in drumming up support. “The idea behind these meetings, something that caught my attention, is that they did not take place during the campaign, because parties only go to neighbourhoods when there are elections. So they were much more appreciated.”
Kast’s religion is key to this strategy, says sociologist Stephanie Alenda, a professor at Andrés Bello University who studies the Chilean right. A devout Catholic activist, Kast belongs to the Schoenstatt movement, which was founded by a Catholic priest in Germany in 1914 and encourages followers to integrate spirituality into everyday life and be active in their communities.
“Kast is someone who has travelled all over the country, who seeks contact with people,” said Alenda, who is conducting research with Republican activists. “The religious pastoral world is extremely important in the party’s structure,” she added. “Grassroots communities, parishes, Catholic and conservative movements contribute to the construction of the project. And they are activists: they know how to campaign.”
Around 70% of Chileans identified as Christian at last year’s census, with Catholicism being the largest denomination. Kast’s presidential candidacy has benefited from the support of the evangelical and ultra-conservative Social Christian Party (PSC), which withdrew its presidential candidate to back him. The PSC has also formed a common electoral front with the Republicans and Kaiser’s National Libertarian Party at the parliamentary elections, which also take place on 16 November.
Juan Molina Romo, an evangelical pastor from the outskirts of Santiago and a PSC candidate for deputy, told openDemocracy that his party is the “home of the evangelical church in Chile” and that Republicans are like “cousins” who represent their values. Molina Romo believes the creation of the PSC is a symptom of the rise of evangelism in politics. “Before, when I presented myself in communities as a candidate representing a church, they questioned me. Now they celebrate me,” he said.
Simón Escoffier, a researcher in political sociology at the Catholic University who also studies Kast’s party, thinks it has managed to diversify its base.
“What the Republican Party did very well was to develop a more popular core, with activist groups in the style of Don’t Mess with my Children [an ultra-conservative movement that emerged in Peru in 2016 to oppose gender equality, reproductive rights and sex education], where Catholic and evangelical people mix with non-religious figures hungry for power,” Escoffier said.
A milestone in this effort was the municipal and regional elections at the end of last year. While the Republicans did not win any governorships and scraped wins in eight mayoral races, they won nearly 200 council seats across the country.
“The party is now beginning to be seen as more relevant when it comes to solving local problems,” Escoffier said. “I think this may have an impact on moderating them in the eyes of the people.”
‘Right-wing Stalinists’
Although Kast is still controversial, his image has improved among women and young people. Polls projecting the results of a second-round run-off show he leads by more than 20 points among people under 24, wins among those aged 25 to 34, and even ties with Jara among women.
Kast’s staff attribute this to a change in tactics, which can be seen in the international image he’s projecting now. Despite having chaired the Political Network for Values – a platform for far-right politicians from Europe, Latin America, the US and Africa – Kast no longer presents himself as the ‘Chilean Jair Bolsonaro’; he prefers to praise Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, whom he visited in September.
Then there is the iron discipline of the party, controlled by the candidate’s inner circle, which has been with him since his first campaign.
“No one deviates from the script”, Kast’s adviser in charge of territorial deployment told me. “If the line coming down from headquarters is that no one talks about abortion on the radio, whether in Santiago or the smallest town you can imagine, it is obeyed.” He paused before offering a more precise definition: “We are right-wing Stalinists”.
Main image: Presidential candidates (l to r) Matthei, Kaiser, Kast, Toha, Jara. Image: Ex-Ante
