Election update: Kast in Pole Position for Runoff

CHILE - In Brief 17 Nov 2025 by Robert Funk

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As expected, Jeannette Jara and José Antonio Kast will face each other in Chile’s runoff presidential election on 14 December. Less expected was Jara’s poor showing, winning just 26.8% of the vote, even less than the 30% support the Boric government tends to maintain. José Antonio Kast (24%), Johannes Kaiser (14%) and Evelyn Matthei (12.5%) also did worse than expected. The reason? Franco Parisi – a non-ideological populist who, on his third run for the presidency won almost 20% of the vote. In fact, the Parisi phenomenon points to the big story of the night, which was not about left or right, but about the decisive rejection of Chile’s traditional parties. In the House of Deputies, the former Chile Vamos (Renovación Nacional and UDI, plus some smaller parties) lost 19 seats. The governing leftist coalition lost 11 seats. The big winners were Parisi’s Party of the People (PdG), which went from 8 to 14 seats, and the new parties of the new right (Republicans and Kaiser’s Social Christian Party) which went from 27 to 42 seats. The other big story is the dramatic defeat not only of Jara, but of the left’s refoundational agenda. Four years ago Gabriel Boric promised a new constitution, a change to the way the pension and health care systems are run, and the end of neoliberalism. After two constitutional defeats, a mediocre economic record and (quite exaggerated) fears about crime, Chilean voters opted for parties that seem not only to want to defend the current system, but deepen it. Much of this is simply the old Latin American pendulum at work – we swing one way and then the other. But more profoundly, it reflects just how badly the left has interpreted what Chileans wan...