[News] The Angry Tide has washed into Chile

[Anti-Imperialist News]

peoplesdispatch.org
<https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/12/21/the-angry-tide-has-washed-into-chile/>
The Angry Tide has washed into Chile
Vijay Prashad
December 21, 2025
------------------------------
[image: image.png]

Far-right President-elect of Chile José Antonio Kast. Photo: X

*Lee en español aquí
<https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/12/21/la-marea-de-la-ira-ha-llegado-a-chile/>*

On December 14, the predictable happened
<https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/12/16/chile-pinochetism-returns-to-power/>:
José Antonio Kast, the candidate of the far-right Republican Party,
prevailed over Jeannette Jara of the Communist Party of Chile by 58.16% to
41.84%. Kast ran as the candidate of the Cambio por Chile (Change for
Chile) platform and was backed by all the parties of the traditional right
and the center-right. Jara, on the other hand, was the candidate of Unidad
por Chile (Unity for Chile), which comprised the parties of the
center-left, including the bloc of Chile’s current president, Gabriel
Boric, the Frente Amplio or Broad Front.

In the first round of the election, Jara had been the lead candidate with
26.58% of the vote
<https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/12/05/chiles-presidential-runoff-communist-party-jara-vs-far-right-kast/>,
while Kast won 23.92%. But this was misleading. The two right-wing
candidates who immediately endorsed Kast, Johannes Kaiser (with 13.94%) and
Evelyn Matthei (with 12.46%), provided him with an arithmetical advantage
of 50.32%. The question for Jara was whether she could surpass 30%. That
she ended up with over 40% is itself a remarkable achievement. It is not
easy for the Chilean population, marinated in anti-communism for several
generations (particularly during the military dictatorship from 1973 to
1990), to consider voting a Communist into the presidential palace, even if
her opponent is a man of the extreme right.

Kast’s arrival in La Moneda, the presidential palace, is part of the Angry
Tide that has been sweeping Latin America from El Salvador
<https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/06/05/one-more-year-of-bukele-tough-on-crime-struggling-with-poverty/>
to Argentina
<https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/10/28/milei-reverses-his-popularity-crisis-and-triumphs-in-legislative-elections/>.
His victory is not entirely unique. It follows the collapse of the liberal
agenda that tried to maintain rigid economic austerity policies alongside
limited social programs; and it is the result of the left’s failure to
build a strong agenda to fulfill the demands of the social uprisings that
have punctually erupted against austerity and hierarchy.
*Read More: Vote count continues in Honduras but either way, the right wing
triumphs
<https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/12/02/vote-count-continues-in-honduras-but-either-way-the-right-wing-triumphs/>*
*The
child of the dictatorship*

José Antonio Kast is a product of Chile’s long shadow, where the unresolved
legacies of the military dictatorship seep into the present. Born in 1966
to a German immigrant family, Kast emerged from the conservative heartlands
of Chilean politics, first as a member of the Independent Democratic Union,
the party most faithfully aligned with Augusto Pinochet’s project. His
political formation is inseparable from that history: an unrepentant
defense of the neoliberal order imposed by force and a moral
authoritarianism dressed up as “tradition”.

Kast’s father (Michael Martin Kast Schindele) served in the *Wehrmacht*
(the German army) and was a member of the Nazi Party. After Germany’s
defeat, Michael Kast fled Allied custody in Italy, returned to Bavaria,
then escaped the postwar denazification process and emigrated to Argentina
and then Chile via the Vatican’s ratlines. In Santiago in 1950, Kast
started a sausage company and built a fortune. His elder son, Miguel Kast
(a “Chicago Boy”) served as Minister of Labor and president of the Central
Bank under the military government of General Augusto Pinochet. The entire
family supported Pinochet. When asked about Pinochet by *La Tercera* in
2017, José Antonio Kast said, “I defended his government, but I never even
had a coffee with him. You don’t have to be very imaginative to think that
if he were alive, he would vote for me. Now, if I had met with him, we
would have had a cup of tea at La Moneda”.

Kast cannot be held responsible for his father. He has said that Nazism is
an ideology with which he disagrees, and one should take him at his word.
On the other hand, the easy facility with which he embraces Pinochet’s
military dictatorship should give one pause. During the social uprising in
Chile in 2019, Kast reinvented himself as the defender of the ordinary
Chilean against migrants, feminists, socialists, communists, and Mapuche
demands against the cruel social order. Kast borrowed from the global far
right: law-and-order fantasies, nostalgia for old hierarchies of race and
gender, and a ruthless contempt for social movements that dare to challenge
entrenched inequality.

What makes Kast dangerous is not his originality, for there is nothing
original about his ideas or his place in society. It is his familiarity
that is dangerous. Despite the end of the military dictatorship thirty-five
years ago, the structures set in place by Pinochet remain. This includes
the Constitution of 1980, which now appears eternal because two attempts to
revise it (in 2022 and 2023) failed. Crucially, Chile’s reality includes
property relations reorganized during the dictatorship to favor the
oligarchy, including Pinochet’s own relatives. During the dictatorship,
Pinochet privatized one of the major mining companies, Sociedad Química y
Minera (SQM), which was taken over by Pinochet’s son-in-law, Julio Ponce
Lerou, (then married to Pinochet’s daughter Verónica). This sort of
dictatorship-driven piracy remained intact after the dictatorship ended
(Pinochet’s granddaughter now runs the company).

These features of the oligarchy and its Pinochet-era consolidation are
crucial to Kast’s prominence and rise. He speaks a language long used in
Chile to justify this inequality: that markets are sacred, that discipline
is virtue, and that memory must be silenced. In moments of crisis, figures
like Kast do not arise by accident. They are summoned by elites when
democracy threatens to become too democratic, when the people begin to ask
for dignity rather than permission. He will be sworn in on March 11, 2026.
*Will Chile rise again?*

A massive social uprising that began in October 2019 brought together many
sections of Chile’s society that had felt the hard edge of neoliberal
austerity. This was not a spontaneous rebellion, but the product of decades
of accumulated grievances rooted in inequality, privatization, and social
humiliation, grievances that had long been contested by various social
forces organized into movements and platforms. That protest led to the
victory of the center-left’s Gabriel Boric in 2021, but Boric’s government
was simply unable to break with the consensus and provide the country with
a new agenda for new times. It was almost a caretaker government from one
right-wing president (Sebastián Piñera, 2010-2014 and 2018-2022) to
another. The streets are calmer now than they were in 2019, but the
structural conditions that produced that uprising have not been dismantled.

When I met Boric before he took office, he was certain that his government
would be able to reform the pension system and perhaps address the
healthcare, education, and housing crises. Nothing was really achieved, and
even constitutional reform failed. With the promise of social mobility no
longer available to the population, particularly the youth, discontent
rose. The center-left lost its legitimacy, and that discontent turned to
disillusionment once again. There is a widespread sense of political
exhaustion and betrayal. Institutions appear incapable of translating
popular demands into real change, reinforcing the idea that voting (even if
compulsory) cannot inaugurate a new world. This demoralization is a real
social force, one that led a large section of Jara’s voters to vote to
block Kast rather than to vote for Jara with enthusiasm.

Chile’s median age is 38. Many young Chileans entered adulthood amid the
social uprising over the past decade, then a pandemic, and finally what
appears to be permanent inflation. With the failure to ratify a new
Constitution and with the victory of Kast, this young Chilean voice for a
different future is certainly going to feel muted. But it will not remain
silenced for long. It will have to come to terms with Kast’s horrendous
program: the continued militarization of the Mapuche territory in the
south, the criminalization of protest, and the expansion of a state that
prepares for containment, not redistribution. Kast’s agenda will not
eliminate unrest but may postpone it for a while, only to sharpen its
eventual return to the streets. When Kast sends the police to beat the
protestors, his followers will undoubtedly take refuge in the language of
legality, while his opponents will speak of the regime’s illegitimacy. If
Kast cannot deliver policies to contain inflation and unemployment,
inequality will rise and produce its own fury.

If a new social uprising does form, what will be its core issue? And will
those who lead it be able to generate a credible political project capable
of channeling that anger toward transformation? If there is no such
project, a repeat of 2019 might move from explosion to disappointment and
then to utter dejection. It will be up to Jara and others around her to
craft an agenda to defend citizens’ constitutional rights against the Kast
government and then to shape a project that is credible and desirable. The
social uprising of 2019 is not a closed chapter; it is an unfinished
sentence. Within that unfinished sentence were the Boric years (2022-2026),
a delay more than anything. Dignity remains the demand. It may reassert
itself, but only when patience runs out again.

*Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a
writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor
of LeftWord Books <https://mayday.leftword.com/> and the director
of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
<https://thetricontinental.org/>. He has written more than 20 books,
including The Darker Nations
<https://smile.amazon.com/Darker-Nations-Peoples-History-Third/dp/1595583424/?tag=alternorg08-20>
and The
Poorer Nations
<https://smile.amazon.com/Poorer-Nations-Possible-History-Global/dp/1781681589/?tag=alternorg08-20>.
His latest books are On Cuba: Reflections on 70 Years of Revolution and
Struggle <https://thenewpress.com/books/on-cuba> (with Noam
Chomsky), Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism
<https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1869-struggle-makes-us-human>, and
(also with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the
Fragility of US Power <https://thenewpress.com/books/withdrawal>. Chelwa
and Prashad will publish How the International Monetary Fund is Suffocating
Africa later this year with Inkani Books <https://inkanibooks.co.za/>.*

*This article was produced by Globetrotter <https://globetrotter.media/>.*
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