SANTIAGO — Chileans are voting in a sharply divided presidential runoff between far-right José Antonio Kast, who leads in polls, and leftist Jeannette Jara, a Communist Party figure and former labor minister. With voting compulsory, many say they will back a candidate who does not fully reflect their views.
At Kast’s final rally in Temuco, several thousand supporters—many young men waving national flags—shouted “Communists out!” The loudest applause greeted promises to deport migrants and lock up criminals en masse. “I’m voting for Kast because of his security agenda,” said 18-year-old Benjamín Sandoval. “The country is very unsafe, you can’t even go out after 10pm these days. They could attack you, and it’s the migrants who are doing it most.”
Fear of crime, heightened by intense media coverage, has become a central issue. A 2024 Gallup global safety report found Chile ranked high for fear of walking alone at night, even though it remains one of Latin America’s safer countries. Violent crime rose over the past four years, with homicides jumping in 2023 before starting to decline, and recent arrivals fleeing Venezuela have pushed migration onto the public agenda.
Kast, 59, a Catholic and father of nine, built his campaign around tougher security and stricter migration controls. His family background is often noted: his father, Michael Kast, was a German soldier and a Nazi Party member who moved to Chile in 1950, and Kast’s brother Miguel served as a minister under Augusto Pinochet. Kast has defended the Pinochet era, which oversaw torture, killings and disappearances, and he first became politically active as a student campaigning for Pinochet in the 1988 plebiscite.
This year Kast has softened or downplayed some socially divisive positions that hurt earlier runs. Pressed in a debate about social issues, he said, “I’m the same man I’ve always been.” His program emphasizes public security and migration alongside business-friendly economic measures: he proposes cutting corporate taxes and trimming roughly $6 billion from the public budget in his first 18 months. He has offered few specifics on how those savings would be achieved beyond broadly saying he would remove many public employees hired during the left-wing Gabriel Boric administration.
Jara, 51, offers a markedly different agenda. She worked as an undersecretary in Michelle Bachelet’s government and served as labor minister under Boric, where she supported pension changes, helped raise the minimum wage, and backed a shorter workweek. A student activist who joined the Communist Party’s youth wing at 14, she has sat on the party’s central committee since 2015.
Her campaign centers on affordability and social supports: a proposed universal core income of about $800 a month paid for in part by gradual minimum-wage increases, lower electricity costs, and state-backed savings schemes to help people aged 25 to 40 buy homes. At her final rally in Santiago, supporters gathered with music and lit trees. “I would never vote for a man who speaks so badly about women, he thinks we are just here to procreate,” said Roxana Muñoz, a 58-year-old cashier. “I totally identify with Jara.”
If the polls are accurate, a Kast win would make him Chile’s most right-wing president since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship in 1990. His election would also reflect broader regional shifts: recent contests in Bolivia, Argentina and Ecuador have produced gains for parties on the right or center-right, signaling changing political currents across Latin America.