Who Will Be Chile’s Next President?
- Renato Cruz Orantes
- Dec 10, 2025
- 7 min read
Updated: Mar 18
Amid deep political polarization and the complicated legacy of the incumbent government of President Gabriel Boric, including two failed constitutional conventions, rising immigration levels and a security crisis in the south of the country, the Chilean people went to the polls this past sixteenth of November in order to cast their votes in the first round of the country’s presidential elections. The results had the candidates Jeannette Jara – nominated by the Communist Party (PCCh) and supported by the ruling progressive coalition, UpCh – come first, with around 26.8% of the vote, and right-wing Republican Party (PRCh) affiliate José Antonio Kast coming a close second with 23.9% of the total vote allowing them to make it to the run-off that is set to be held on the fourteenth of December.
The two main candidates, Jara and Kast, exist as the condensation of the last thirty to forty years of political life in the South American country and a very clean reflection of the deep division and polarization that is becoming ever more prevalent in Chilean society. Their two drastically different backgrounds and careers help us understand the different realities that exist in parallel in their country.
The winner of the first round, Jeanette Jara Román, was born in an impoverished area of the capital Santiago in 1974. She is the daughter of a mechanic and a stay-at-home mother. Jara grew up to be the first member of her family to attend a higher education institution, the University of Santiago, where she graduated with a degree in public administration, and later, at the Central University, where she studied law. Jara became politically involved at a very young age, joining the Communist Youth at age 14, where she quickly took leadership positions. Jara would eventually end up working in the first administration of socialist president, Michelle Bachelet, from 2005 to 2010. Although she would remain a low-profile figure, mostly working in academia, until she was unexpectedly appointed as labor minister by current president, Gabriel Boric, after his victory in the 2021 elections. As labor minister, Jara has overseen the implementation of popular reforms such as the shortening of the work week to forty hours and a significant rise in the minimum wage. Jara was chosen by the Communist Party as their precandidate for the presidential primaries for the ruling United for Chile (UpCh) coalition back in May of this year in an unexpected landslide, managing to beat both Carolina Tohá, backed by the establishment Democratic Socialists and Gonzalo Winter of President Boric’s Broad Front party with around 60.16% of the votes, giving the Communist Party their first chance to lead the left-of-center coalition in Chile’s democratic history. Jara’s campaign, both in the primary and now in the general election, has benefited from a large amount from her image as a working class, down-to-earth, and pragmatic negotiation strategies has allowed her campaign to differentiate Jara as a figure, both from the traditional left and the progressive factions represented by figures like Boric and Winter, as well as the most prominent right-wing figures such as her main opponent, Kast and the other relevant candidates such as the establishment center-right Evelyn Matthei, the ultra-conservative Johannes Kaiser or even the centrist Franco Parisi, whom of which all come from the economical and political elites of the country. This genuine familiarity to the reality of ordinary Chileans is her more useful weapon and could be her key to defeat Kast in the run-offs. Will this be enough considering the results, and in general the demands of a big portion of the Chilean population, which seem to be more orientated towards security and migration issues, which are inherently more complicated to deal with for the left?
On the other side of the political spectrum, and the second place candidate of the first round, we can find the Republican Party candidate, José Antonio Kast Rist, born in Santiago in 1966 as the second-to-last of ten siblings. His parents, Michael Kast Schindele and Olga Rist Hagspiel, immigrated to Chile after the end of World War II due to Michael’s role as lieutenant in the Wehrmacht. After the Coup of September 1973, the Kast family became deeply involved with the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, with José Antonio’s older brother Miguel even serving in various cabinet positions related to economic affairs during the late 1970s and early 1980s. José Antonio studied law at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, where he got involved in the student government and became a member of the Independent Democratic Union (UDI), a Pinochetist right-wing party. After graduating in 1990, José Antonio practiced law for a few years before being elected as a councilor in the Buin municipality of the Santiago region, a position Kast would hold until 2000.
A year later, in 2001, he was elected as a member of the Chamber of Deputies representing the thirtieth district, a position to which Kast would be reelected in 2005 and 2009. During his first couple of terms as a parliamentarian, Kast mostly followed his party’s political line and only got involved in some specific issues, such as the education commission, which became relevant after the so-called penguin revolution of 2006 when high school students went on strike demanding the repelling of the Pinochet-era education law (LOCE). This law gave away the administration of the education sector almost entirely to private enterprises. As a consequence of the protests, then-president Bachelet decided to repeal and replace the LOCE, a process that would end up taking two years, and in which Kast and other UDI members of congress managed to keep most of the benefits and protections the private education industry enjoyed and managing to delay the implementation of the new law for two years until 2009.
Towards the end of his third term as a deputy, Kast was elected as secretary general of UDI in 2012, after having been defeated in the party’s leadership election of 2008. In 2013, Kast ran as a precandidate for the Senate in Santiago Oriente and failed to win the nomination process, after which he decided to return to the chamber of deputies for one more term, although now representing the twenty-fourth district. In 2015, Kast announced his intentions to be the presidential candidate of the Chile Vamos coalition, which the UDI was a part of, for the 2017 elections. However, due to increasing differences between him and the party and the unwillingness of the party to support his presidential run, Kast left UDI in early 2016 and started an independent bid for the presidency. Kast ended up getting 7.93% of the votes on the first round of the 2017 elections, significantly overperforming the polls, which had him at around 3% and solidifying the idea that a more radical, populist version of the right had a chance in Chilean politics. Kast used the political structures used around his 2017 campaign to build a new political party, the Republican Party of Chile (PRCh), which would end up being formalized in 2019.
Kast spent the following year preparing himself for a second presidential run in 2021 and campaigning against the constitutional referendum of 2020. Kast managed to end up first in the first round of the 2021 elections with 27.91%, for the second round Kast managed to get the support of the traditional right-wing parties - including the UDI - by moderating in certain issues such as global warming, abortion and LGBT+ rights but still ended up losing, only obtaining 44.13% of the votes in the second round - against Boric’s 55.87%. For his third presidential run this year Kast not only has deal with Jara and the other minor left-wing candidates but also with others in the right who are his direct competitors, such as Johannes Kaiser, a former member of the Republican Party that had to quit after a series of posts in social media where he put in doubt women’s right to vote, among other controversial remarks, Kaiser went on to found his own political platform, the National Libertarian Party, partially based on the argentinean Libertarian Party which brought Javier Milei to his country’s presidency back in 2023. Kast focused his campaign on immigration, security and taking advantage of the instability of Boric’s government which has constantly struggled to put its government project forward, the two failed constitutional drafts and the security crisis in the south of the country, one of the poorer regions, where the Chilean state is confronting the insurgency of radical indigenous groups, as a product of historical land disputes. Kant, contrary to historical trends in Chile and abroad, is doing particularly well with Chile’s youth and lower classes, with Jara doing better with older population groups and the urban middle class, paralleling to some extent the demographic of other populist right movements’ vote bases such as Trump and the GOP in the US or LePen’s National Rally in France. Even with Kast losing to Jara in the first round by around 3%, the situation is actually in Kast’s favour as his voteshare combined with the other right wing parties, - Kaiser (13. 94%), Matthei (12.46%) and Parisi (19.71%) - completely obliterates Jara’s 26.85%, even when combined with the minor left-wing candidates, Enríquez-Omami (1.20%) and Artés (0.66%).
The second round of this year’s elections will be a defining moment for Chile’s political history, and in the case of a Kast victory, it’ll be an important win for the international populist right-wing movement. It will represent the end of an era for Chilean politics, an era that started with the return to democracy in 1990.
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