Kast’s Victory Signifies Chile’s Refusal To Become Another Venezuela

Last weekend, Chile was faced with a historic decision. The odds couldn’t have been higher. Called to choose between a return to the policies that made it the most prosperous nation in South America and doubling down on the path of big spending, adventurist, bourgeois-bohème leftism, Chile proved its collective maturity by betting on José António Kast—a genuinely patriotic, responsible, and, overall, decent man. 

The election was a fateful contest between two irreconcilable visions of society and the world. Kast, a committed Roman Catholic and the son of humble Bavarian immigrants, ran as the candidate of authority, economic realism, and national cohesion. His adversary was Jeannette Jara, a member of the Chilean Communist Party and Minister of Labour under the incumbent president Gabriel Boric. Jara ran a campaign typical of the regional far-left, promising to go further than Boric had ventured in dismantling the unique economic and political model that, built under the harsh but sensible leadership of General Augusto Pinochet, made Chile something of a South American Switzerland—a much admired, much envied example of success in almost every field, from per capita GDP to public debt, HDI, or average life expectancy. 

The heir to decades of left-wing revanchism directed towards Pinochet’s successful reforms, Jara promised to undo what had worked with an explosive cocktail of wealth redistribution without wealth production and the promise of rights to all without duties to any. Her platform repeated the revolutionary romanticism that had made Venezuela go down the road of disaster. It was impossible not to hear at least some echoes of 1970, when Chile stood at a similar crossroads between the philo-communist candidate Salvador Allende and the centre-right Jorge Alessandri. Then, the country chose utopia and disaster. It took the military rising of September 1973 to save the country from the terrifying prospect of genuine communist rule, with everything that would have come with it—not only the rigours of mass impoverishment, but those of political persecutions incomparable in scope and gravity to the regrettable, but contextually measured, repressions of the Pinochet junta.

This time, Chile chose differently. First and foremost, Kast’s landslide triumph—he won with 60% of the vote—is an unmistakable rejection of the Venezuelan path. His opponent offered the well-worn script of twenty-first-century South American socialism: a bloated state, the distribution of nonexistent wealth, and an aggressive remaking of society in the name of “social justice.” Chileans have seen this movie before—not only in their own past, but across the continent. They have watched Venezuela descend from one of the wealthiest nations in Latin America into one synonymous with poverty and mass emigration. They decided they would not be next.

Kast represented the antithesis of that model. A social conservative and an unapologetic defender of law and order, he didn’t run as a revolutionary, but as a restorer. His programme did not promise paradise on earth; it promised normality. Security in the streets. Actual, meaningful borders again—and limits to the mass immigration that has plagued Chile in recent years. Respect for property. A state that wishes to be strong rather than bloated. These are modest ambitions only in societies that have not yet lost them.

Crucially, Kast stands as the political heir—unfashionable as it may be to say so—of the policies that transformed Chile into the most successful country in South America. For decades, Chile distinguished itself through fiscal discipline, the strength of its institutions, political stability, and a culture of work rather than entitlement. Those policies lifted millions out of poverty, built a dynamic middle class, and made Chile an outlier in a troubled region. The Left has spent years trying to delegitimise that legacy, reducing it to caricature and moral condemnation. Chilean voters have now issued their reply.

This is not to say that Chileans are blind to inequality or social tension. These are real issues in the post-Pinochet era; they’re what led to the rise of a Left so bitterly committed to overthrowing every single institution inherited from the military regime, a process that reached its apex in the 2022 attempt to constitutionally redefine Chile as a “plurinational, ecological,” wokeist regime with specific protections given to its “historically marginalised groups,” including “women, children, and sexual and gender minorities.” That drivel was soundly rejected in that year’s referendum by a 62% to 38% margin. Like that victory of common sense, what Kast’s election means is that Chileans understand that destroying the foundations of prosperity is not how one corrects its imperfections. The election reflects a mature electorate that understands trade-offs—a degree of collective wisdom increasingly rare in Western democracies. 

There is also a deeper cultural dimension to this election. Kast’s Catholicism is not incidental. In a political age still dominated—in Europe, at least—by technocrats and moral relativists, Kast has publicly promised to revoke abortion in his country. He speaks openly of responsibility, authority, family, and nation. He does not pretend that a society can survive without shared norms, or that the state can replace the moral infrastructure provided by tradition. Unlike Argentina’s Milei, whose libertarian vision is wholly economy-centered, Kast offers a project grounded in the historic identity of Chile.

Kast is, predictably, already being demonised by the largely left-wing international press. He’s being shamed for, as a young man, having supported the 1988 “Yes” campaign that, if successful, would have allowed General Pinochet to continue serving as Chile’s head of state for eight years under restored democratic rule. He’s even being defamed as a Nazi because his Bavarian father had served in the German Wehrmacht during World War Two. These accusations are familiar—they’re eagerly and cynically deployed whenever voters defy progressive expectations. Yet what truly frightens his critics is not his programme, but the possibility that a nation confronted with chaos, crime, and economic uncertainty chose order—and did so freely, serenely, and overwhelmingly.

At the end of the day, the significance of Kast’s victory lies precisely there: in demonstrating that the cycle of decline is not inevitable, and that nations are not condemned to drift endlessly leftward until collapse. Chile has shown that, even after years of unrest and ideological pressure, a people can still choose stability over fantasy, responsibility over resentment, and continuity over self-destruction. With Kast, history offered Chile a second chance. This time, it took it.