Different right-wing candidates offered a wide range of alternatives and coalesced in the second turn, immigration from Venezuela was broadly used as a campaign talking point that spoke to a wide range of the population, the relations between newly elected President Kemp and world right-wing leaders. A conversation with Javier Sajuria, a recent guest at the Institute. 

The first round of the Chilean presidential elections signaled a dramatic shift in the electorate that four years ago had chosen the young left-wing candidate Gabriel Boric. On December 14, José Antonio Kast, a right-wing candidate from an important conservative family linked to the regime of Augusto Pinochet, was elected in the second round. Before the vote, we met Javier Sajuria, a Chilean political scientist who teaches at Queen Mary College in London, visiting the Istituto Ciampi at Scuola Normale Superiore. We asked Sajuria to talk to us about the Chilean vote and what it means. Already after the first round, with the three right-wing candidates exceeding 50%, it was clear that Kast would become the next president.

“I will try to outline the differences between the three candidates and describe the social coalitions: who voted for whom and why. Talking about all the candidates on the Chilean right is useful for understanding what kind of political and social coalition has been formed. 

Let’s start with the candidate of the traditional Chilean right, Evelyn Matthei, a former minister under Sebastian Piñera, the only right-wing president in Chile’s post-Pinochet history. Mattei has been in government twice and is a member of the Unión Demócrata Independiente (UDI), the most moderate and traditional of the right-wing parties, and has always been a less conservative voice in her party on ethical issues such as abortion. She is mainly supported by the wealthier classes in Santiago, but her result is also the worst ever for her party. The votes of the UDI members elected to Congress, though, will still be necessary for any majority.

Kast also comes from the UDI but left the party more than ten years ago because he considered it too left-wing. Kast comes from a very Catholic and ultra-conservative family—his father, a follower of Milton Friedman, was president of the National Bank—and is a follower of Jaime Guzman, a law professor and ideologue of the dictatorship that shaped the 1980 constitution. He has conservative views on ethical issues, but his strength has been his anti-immigration and anti-crime rhetoric, an issue that, politically, in Latin America, pays off exclusively in Chile. Kast has close ties to the international right wing, was a guest at the CPAC conference in Hungary (Conservative Political Action Conference, traditionally held in the US, now also in Europe), is a fan of Orban, and attended the international meeting organized by Vox. Finally, there is Johannes Kaiser, the outsider of a trio in which, curiously, all have German origins. Kaiser comes from a libertarian family, his sister was elected to the Senate, and his brother is a libertarian intellectual. Kaiser is a YouTuber, famous for his rhetoric against women (and women’s suffrage), LGBT people, and immigration. Elected in 2021, he built a platform on these issues with a style very close to that of Trump, Milei, and Bolsonaro, not building a political force but relying solely on charismatic leadership. This presence was excellent for Kast, who avoided the civil and social rights issues that cost him the election in 2021. On the night of the first round vote, Kaiser went to Kast’s headquarters to congratulate him. It can be said that in some respects they worked in tandem. 

In terms of the electorate, Matthei attracts the votes of the wealthy classes, especially in Santiago, while Kast did very well in the south, where there is constant conflict between the institutions and the Mapuche, and in the northern cities, where immigration is concentrated.

How can this shift to the right be explained?

Since 2005, the ruling party has lost the elections. It is therefore not just a failure of the left but a trend towards change. That said, the right has taken more than 50%, which is something new. The other factor is anti-communist sentiment, despite the fact that the Communist Party tends to be responsible and respectful of institutions. This is a widespread sentiment that is fueled in Latin America: in Argentina, there is no Communist Party of any significance, but Milei has often used the insult “communist shit” against his political opponents on the left. A recent sample survey shows that even center-left voters see communists as a threat to democracy. 

Interestingly, there is a fourth candidate, Franco Parisi, who has neoliberal economic ideas but is a pure populist. The thing that comes to mind when I try to find a comparison for his Partido de la Gente is the early Five Star Movement, which cannot be defined as right or left but has an anti-establishment rhetoric. Parisi won almost 20% of the vote and elected 14 deputies. His success is mainly due to the vote in the mining regions (which are not poor). 

To draw a comparison with Milei’s Argentina, Kast also lacks the political mandate and congressional majority to implement his political program.

He will not have a majority and will have to make deals with other parties, but there are tools that the Boric government has approved in response to public pressure—and which were not part of his agenda—that give the government a lot of freedom in matters of security and crime. There is a new minister for public security, a new crime agency, and a new civil intelligence system that did not exist before. So the amount of power and resources that Castro will have over crime and immigration without having to go through Congress is enormous. It is much more than any of his predecessors had. 

So, Kast may not have the votes in Parliament to pass any reform he wants, or he may have to negotiate with other right-wing forces on a case-by-case basis, but on the issues that were the focus of his campaign, he has the powers to implement them. Of course, Kast campaigned for an absolute majority or even the three-fifths majority needed to amend the Constitution. He did not achieve either, but there is much he can do without going through Congress. Even within the democratic constitutional limits, the presidency has more powers than before. Kast has not shied away from signaling that he could use them. He could even use the army on the streets, which, in democratic Chile, has only been seen during the major protests of 2019. Now, it is pointless to point out that deploying the military on the streets in Chile is something that evokes ghosts. 

One area where Kast will have problems, I believe, is taxation: he has promised to cut taxes, particularly for businesses, and to cut public spending. On this, he needs the vote of Congress, with which he will inevitably have to negotiate.  The Chilean Congress is very fragmented, not only because of the number of parties that manage to elect their representatives, but also because within each party there are factions that act on their own behalf, and there is no party discipline. Every government has to seek votes one by one, much like in the US Senate. This means that he will have to negotiate with the Partido de la Gente (PDG), which elected 14 members of parliament. The PDG will often be the key, especially in the Chamber of Deputies, which is essentially divided in half. Here, Kast will always need at least one vote to get his laws passed. 

Is there a real immigration and crime emergency in Chile? Or is there, as sometimes happens, a social alarm that is not entirely justified and fueled by right-wing political forces?

Let’s start with crime statistics. If we cross-reference police data with the number of reports, it is difficult to know exactly what is happening because many crimes go unreported, whether it be sexual violence due to stigma for the victim or theft because people think it is pointless. However, there is a perception that the country is becoming like most Latin American countries. The truth is that the gap between perception and reality is quite large, despite the penetration of Venezuelan cartels. We are therefore faced with a combination of new crime and the media and politics exploiting and amplifying its impact. But the situation is not serious. Let’s take an example: the entire global right-wing praises Salvadoran President Bukele’s methods of fighting crime, which, since he was elected, has gone from 100 murders per 100,000 people per year—a figure that no country in the world had ever reached—to almost 0. Before, everyone knew someone who had been murdered; today, everyone knows someone in prison. In Mexico, there are 25 murders per 100,000 inhabitants and in Ecuador 45. In Chile, at the peak of crime immediately after the pandemic, the number of murders was 6 per 100,000 people, but today it is 3-4, when the best figure ever recorded is two. In short, Chile is a safe country, like Uruguay or Costa Rica. 

When it comes to immigration, it is worth noting that although the influx of people fleeing Venezuela is not comparable to that towards Colombia, it has been very rapid. Ten years ago, immigrants accounted for 1% of the population, but today they account for 9-10%, with the majority arriving in the last seven years. The rapid growth in the number of migrants has, in some areas, put pressure on the quality of public services, schools, and healthcare. Neither Piñera nor Boric have been able to set up an effective system for regularizing these people, many of whom therefore live as irregular immigrants, which increases their marginalization and thus the perception of insecurity among the population. This is all the more so given that in recent years, drug cartels have penetrated some countries—Ecuador in particular—leading to an increase in violence. There is also this perception of what is happening outside the country.

You mentioned special powers. Is there a risk of an authoritarian drift? 

There is a risk of autocratic drift. Many people I have spoken to think of Kast as a candidate who respects institutions: ‘He may have extreme ideas, but he is a politician who has been elected several times, he is elegant’. I am more skeptical, mainly because I look at the people he associates with: he is extremely close to Orban, Trump, and Bolsonaro, and he often cites Bukele’s policies as an example. And then he was a supporter of Pinochet, which does not make him immune to the siren call of authoritarianism. All the right-wing candidates are united in their opposition to the independence of the judiciary. I can’t help thinking that he might have authoritarian tendencies. Will he use them? The Chilean system does not allow re-election for two consecutive terms, so we don’t know if he will want to avoid certain tendencies in order to be able to run again in eight years’ time, or if he will take advantage of the opportunity he is being given, a bit like Milei does. 

Are there any antibodies in Chilean society?

As in Argentina, there is a reinterpretation of the period of dictatorship and, unlike in Argentina, where the generals were put in prison, the Chilean transition saw the integration of civilian members of the dictatorship into the state and politics, with Pinochet remaining head of the armed forces for a few years. There was no clean break. I believe there is a widespread feeling that, deep down, the dictatorship wasn’t so bad after all, a feeling fueled by the right wing, just as there is a strong anti-feminist push, not in the sense that abortion is unpopular, for example, but that those who oppose it have become more vocal. But immigration remains at the center of everything. I remember a bit of xenophobia, but nowhere near the levels we see today.