By Lisa Zanotti
Democratic erosion does not always arrive through rupture. In Chile, early decisions by Kast’s government suggest a subtler process: the gradual narrowing of democracy from within.
Less than a month into José Antonio Kast’s presidency, the gap between his campaign promise and his governing practice has become difficult to ignore. Kast won a decisive second-round victory in Chile’s 2025 presidential election, consolidating right-wing support around a narrative of overlapping crises — insecurity, economic stagnation, and uncontrolled migration. He framed his incoming administration as a “government of emergency,” pledging to focus on the urgent problems ordinary Chileans cared about most. Yet the administration’s most visible early moves have not been emergency responses. They have been partisan signals — ideological boundary-drawing exercises that reveal the deeper logic of Chile’s far right. While commentators have described these measures as distractions from the government’s core agenda, this reading misses the deeper logic: these measures are not deviations — they reflect core features of the project itself.
The Emergency as a Narrative
The measures that defined Kast’s first weeks share a common logic. Rather than addressing the emergencies the campaign invoked, they worked as signals — drawing boundaries around who belongs to the political community and on what terms. Within two weeks of taking office, Kast’s communications team published a social media message declaring that the Chilean state had been left “bankrupt” by the previous government. The claim was so overblown that it was publicly contradicted by Kast’s own ministers of Finance and Interior, and the Comptroller General demanded a formal explanation. The post was deleted, and the advisor responsible acknowledged the error. But the episode was telling: rather than governing the emergency, the administration’s instinct was to construct a narrative of inherited ruin — a familiar move designed to delegitimize the predecessor and justify extraordinary measures.
The measures that defined Kast’s first weeks share a common logic. Rather than addressing the emergencies the campaign invoked, they worked as signals — drawing boundaries around who belongs to the political community and on what terms.
Around the same time, the government withdrew Chile’s support for former president Michelle Bachelet’s candidacy for Secretary-General of the United Nations, a bid that had been launched by the Boric administration with backing from Brazil and Mexico. The Foreign Ministry called the candidacy “unviable,” but the timing — just days after Kast attended Donald Trump’s “Shield of the Americas” summit — and the broader political context suggested that the decision was less about diplomatic pragmatism than about partisan realignment in foreign policy.
Then came two measures that struck closer to the heart of social policy. The government pulled from the Comptroller General’s office the decree needed to implement a new Adoption Law — legislation that had taken twelve years to pass through Congress and was designed to accelerate adoption processes and expand the range of eligible families, including single individuals and couples in civil unions. The stated reason was “updating” the regulation, but critics noted that the law’s provisions regarding diverse family structures appeared to be the real target. The decree was resubmitted days later under political pressure, but the signal had already been sent.
Finally, as part of its “National Reconstruction Plan,” the government proposed limiting access to free university education (gratuidad) for students over 30 — a measure affecting a small percentage of beneficiaries but carrying disproportionate symbolic weight. For many Chileans, particularly women and workers from low-income backgrounds who had delayed higher education due to caregiving or economic necessity, the proposal amounted to punishment for structural inequality. Student protests — the first major demonstrations against the new government — followed within days.
Narrowing Democracy from Within
None of these measures, taken individually, constitutes a democratic breakdown. That is precisely the point. As I have argued elsewhere, the far right in Chile does not seek to overthrow the democratic regime but to narrow it from within: preserving electoral competition while redefining who belongs, conditioning full access to rights on civic-moral conformity, and elevating order as the overriding principle of governance.
…the far right in Chile does not seek to overthrow the democratic regime but to narrow it from within…
These early measures follow a pattern of otherization— the far right’s strategy of constructing out-groups whose exclusion is framed as necessary for restoring order and moral cohesion. The “bankruptcy” narrative delegitimizes the previous government as fiscally destructive. The Bachelet decision reasserts that the left has no place in representing Chile abroad. The adoption law retreat signals that family diversity remains contested terrain. And the gratuidad restriction draws a line around who deserves public investment — separating the “deserving young” from those whose life circumstances delayed their education. Moreover, the government announced it would reverse the expropriation of land at Colonia Dignidad — a former German enclave in southern Chile, founded by Paul Schäfer, that operated as a detention and torture center during the Pinochet dictatorship and where Schäfer sexually abused Chilean and German children for decades. The Boric administration had begun expropriating 117 hectares to build a memorial site for the victims, as part of a 2017 commitment between Chile and Germany. The Kast government framed the reversal as a matter of fiscal priorities and housing needs — reclassifying memory politics as an expendable line item.
Each move, on its own, can be explained away as technical, fiscal, or diplomatic. Together, they trace the contours of an exclusionary project operating within — not against — democratic institutions. This is consistent with what Fabián Villalobos-Machuca and I described in a recent analysis: Kast holds a strong electoral mandate, but his room for maneuver is structurally constrained by a fragmented Congress and a Senate where the government lacks the quorum for constitutional reform. The institutional architecture functions as a brake — but it does not prevent the gradual shifting of norms, the redrawing of what is sayable, and the reclassification of who counts as a legitimate political subject.
What Is at Stake
The real question for Chilean democracy is not whether Kast will attempt an institutional rupture — the checks and balances make that unlikely in the short term. The question is whether the traditional right, represented by the Chile Vamos coalition, will act as a firewall or as a transmission belt. Early signs are not encouraging: the parties of the center-right avoided drawing clear lines against the Republican Party’s agenda during the campaign, and the first weeks of government suggest that convergence, not containment, remains the default. There have been exceptions — individual legislators from Renovación Nacional have publicly criticized specific measures such as the gratuidad restriction — but these dissenting voices frame their role as one of ‘loyal collaboration,’ not structural opposition.
The question is whether the traditional right, represented by the Chile Vamos coalition, will act as a firewall or as a transmission belt
Chile’s institutional checks make an authoritarian rupture unlikely in the short term. But the first weeks of the Kast presidency suggest that the real risk lies elsewhere — in the accumulation of small exclusions, each defensible on its own terms, that together shift what counts as normal governance. The traditional right’s response will be decisive. So far, it has opted for accommodation over resistance. If that pattern holds, the cost will not be measured in regime type but in the steady narrowing of who Chilean democracy is actually for.
Lisa Zanotti is a Research Affiliate at the De- and Re-Democratization (DRD) Workgroup at the CEU Democracy Institute.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
