Chile pivots back to the hard-right

When José Antonio Kast was elected as Chile’s next president in late 2025, it was “one more alarming case of a worldwide trend toward nativist authoritarianism,” said the Chilean American author Ariel Dorfman at The New York Times. It was also a sign of the “rehabilitation” of former dictator Augusto Pinochet, one of the continent’s “most infamous autocrats.”

Kast, as a vocal supporter of the notoriously brutal Chilean strongman, was elected in part for his hard-right bona fides, only to...