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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/12/21/the-angry-tide-has-washed-into-chile/">peoplesdispatch.org</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">The Angry Tide has washed into Chile</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Vijay Prashad</div>
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<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">December 21, 2025</div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><img src="cid:ii_mjitik160" alt="image.png" width="521" height="293"><br><p>Far-right President-elect of Chile José Antonio Kast. Photo: X </p><div>
<p><em>Lee en español <a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/12/21/la-marea-de-la-ira-ha-llegado-a-chile/">aquí</a></em></p>
<p>On December 14, <a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/12/16/chile-pinochetism-returns-to-power/">the predictable happened</a>:
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\u2019s current president,
Gabriel Boric, the Frente Amplio or Broad Front.</p>
<p>In the first round of the election, <a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/12/05/chiles-presidential-runoff-communist-party-jara-vs-far-right-kast/">Jara had been the lead candidate with 26.58% of the vote</a>,
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.</p>
<p>Kast\u2019s arrival in La Moneda, the presidential palace, is part of the Angry Tide that has been sweeping Latin America from <a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/06/05/one-more-year-of-bukele-tough-on-crime-struggling-with-poverty/">El Salvador</a> to <a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/10/28/milei-reverses-his-popularity-crisis-and-triumphs-in-legislative-elections/">Argentina</a>.
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\u2019s
failure to build a strong agenda to fulfill the demands of the social
uprisings that have punctually erupted against austerity and hierarchy.</p>
<h3><strong><em>Read More: <a href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/12/02/vote-count-continues-in-honduras-but-either-way-the-right-wing-triumphs/">Vote count continues in Honduras but either way, the right wing triumphs</a></em></strong></h3>
<h3><b>The child of the dictatorship</b></h3>
<p>José Antonio Kast is a product of Chile\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201ctradition\u201d.</p>
<p>Kast\u2019s father (Michael Martin Kast Schindele) served in the <i>Wehrmacht</i>
(the German army) and was a member of the Nazi Party. After Germany\u2019s
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\u2019s ratlines. In Santiago in
1950, Kast started a sausage company and built a fortune. His elder son,
Miguel Kast (a \u201cChicago Boy\u201d) 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 <i>La Tercera</i> in 2017, José Antonio Kast said, \u201cI
defended his government, but I never even had a coffee with him. You
don\u2019t 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\u201d.</p>
<p>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\u2019s 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.</p>
<p>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\u2019s reality includes property relations
reorganized during the dictatorship to favor the oligarchy, including
Pinochet\u2019s own relatives. During the dictatorship, Pinochet privatized
one of the major mining companies, Sociedad Química y Minera (SQM),
which was taken over by Pinochet\u2019s son-in-law, Julio Ponce Lerou, (then
married to Pinochet\u2019s daughter Verónica). This sort of
dictatorship-driven piracy remained intact after the dictatorship ended
(Pinochet\u2019s granddaughter now runs the company).</p>
<p>These features of the oligarchy and its Pinochet-era consolidation
are crucial to Kast\u2019s 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.</p>
<h3><b>Will Chile rise again?</b></h3>
<p>A massive social uprising that began in October 2019 brought together
many sections of Chile\u2019s 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\u2019s Gabriel
Boric in 2021, but Boric\u2019s 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.</p>
<p>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\u2019s voters to vote to block Kast rather than to vote
for Jara with enthusiasm.</p>
<p>Chile\u2019s 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\u2019s
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\u2019s 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\u2019s illegitimacy. If Kast cannot deliver policies to contain
inflation and unemployment, inequality will rise and produce its own
fury.</p>
<p>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\u2019 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.</p>
<p><em><strong>Vijay Prashad</strong> is an Indian historian, editor,
and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at
Globetrotter. He is an editor of <a href="https://mayday.leftword.com/">LeftWord Books</a> and the director of <a href="https://thetricontinental.org/">Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research</a>. He has written more than 20 books, including <a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Darker-Nations-Peoples-History-Third/dp/1595583424/?tag=alternorg08-20">The Darker Nations</a> and <a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Poorer-Nations-Possible-History-Global/dp/1781681589/?tag=alternorg08-20">The Poorer Nations</a>. His latest books are <a href="https://thenewpress.com/books/on-cuba">On Cuba: Reflections on 70 Years of Revolution and Struggle</a> (with Noam Chomsky), <a href="https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1869-struggle-makes-us-human">Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism</a>, and (also with Noam Chomsky) <a href="https://thenewpress.com/books/withdrawal">The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of US Power</a>. Chelwa and Prashad will publish How the International Monetary Fund is Suffocating Africa later this year with <a href="https://inkanibooks.co.za/">Inkani Books</a>.</em></p>
<p><em>This article was produced by<a href="https://globetrotter.media/"> Globetrotter</a>.</em></p>
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