Critical Mistakes Led to Kast’s Defeat in Chile’s Presidential Runoff Election

Santiago, Chile — In Chile’s runoff election of December 19, 2021, Gabriel Boric, a Marxist, was acknowledged as the newly elected president of Chile. What does this mean for Chile? There are three issues to consider: 1) the mistakes made by the groups that supported José Antonio Kast, the Christian and patriotic candidate (who declared himself to be “social Cristiano”); 2) the main goals of Gabriel Boric’s government, according to his program and trajectory and those of his supporters; and 3) what patriotic Chileans can and should do in the current situation. This article addresses the mistakes of those supporting Kast.

During the campaign for the runoff elections, Kast, leader of the three-year-old Partido Republicano (Republican Party), realized that he did not command the necessary political structure to rule Chile in the case of a win, and therefore came to a deal with the political parties traditionally representing what in Chile is called “the right” — the Renovación Nacional (the party of the current president, Sebastián Piñera), UDI (Unión Democrática Independiente), and Evopoli. This “coalition” of parties created the conditions leading to Kast’s defeat.

The first “mistake” these groups made was to create a division within the Republican Party, that is to say, within Kast’s own party. An example of this is seen in their campaign against Johannes Káiser, which they either orchestrated or simply profited from. Káiser was a novel and popular politician from southern Chile who was instrumental in Kast’s triumph there in the first-round election, and who was elected a representative in November. The parties promoted a complaint against Káiser (regarding a comment he made five years ago) in the Supreme Court of the Republican Party, and he was forced to resign from the party.

Second, the parties attached heavy strings to their support, considerably weakening the candidacy. They took control of the presidential campaign and introduced a discourse that was at odds with the traditional rhetoric of both José Antonio Kast and the Republican Party. For example, they made the current president’s (Piñera’s) vice minister of health, Paula Daza, the spokesperson of Kast’s campaign. Yet Paula Daza is regarded as the symbol of the violation of liberty through her sanitary measures related to COVID-19, while Kast was supposed to be the icon of freedom. This shift deflated Kast’s strongest supporters. The parties also changed Kast’s program to make it far less pungent regarding the defense of life and the family. In this way, they abandoned the strategy of the hitherto energetic and winning campaign and adopted a different one, precisely the same one of Piñera, which is neutralizing the Chilean patriotic and “conservative” movement.

(An important parenthesis that must be added here is that, after the first-round election, José Antonio Kast made a surprise trip to the United States and met with, among others, neoconservative U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). There are those who believe that Sen. Rubio had a nefarious influence over Kast’s position in the following weeks, because it was widely acknowledged that Kast was not the same when he returned. I tend to agree with these suspicions, because of what Rubio had done two years earlier in Venezuela. In January 2019, he and U.S. Vice President Mike Pence promised imminent U.S. military intervention in the country, causing many anti-communist Venezuelan military personnel and police agents to express their dissent with the communist regime. In turn, thousands of soldiers and police crossed the Colombian and Brazilian borders with the hope of helping the supposed opposition leader Juan Guaidó liberate the country. Thousands of others refused to repress their own people, trusting that the U.S. intervention and liberation were at hand. But that intervention never came, and the anti-communists were all left in exile or to be killed by forces loyal to Nicolás Maduro. Senator Rubio was instrumental in the biggest purge suffered by the Venezuelan armed forces and police since the first years of the revolution. In this, he acted either deliberately or rashly — and he does not seem rash.)

The third mistake leading to Kast’s defeat in 2021 is that the parties failed to demand the minimal guarantees for a fair election — a system to prevent voting multiple times and the requirement of an audit of the books with the voters’ signatures.

In part, at least, the first two mistakes — the splitting of the Republican Party and weakening of Kast’s program — are the consequences of structural factors in Chilean politics. The elites of the parties Kast dealt with are oligarchic in the full sense of the word. They dislike newcomers and foreigners, and seem to think “after me, the deluge,” i.e., they would prefer to let the country go down in flames rather than let other people lead it into what they call “the right.” Plus, they use rules of experience (such as yielding to what they perceive as “trends of opinion” or public opinion) to guide their decisions, yet they fail to perceive that their rules are outdated and no longer apply to a situation where foreign enemies — such as the Chinese Communist Party and its Latin American satellites — are trying to take control over the country in order to destroy it and transform it into a communist colony. Lastly — and most nefariously — they are infiltrated. However, those who are not infiltrators are blinded to the treachery because, according to their mind-set, “their team, their own” could not be against them.

These mistakes have considerably weakened the ability of José Antonio Kast and the Republican Party of Chile to resist the communist and sanitary (government overreach in response to COVID-19) tyranny falling upon this unfortunate country, and ultimately (chiefly through allowing fraud) led to Kast’s defeat in December’s runoff election. Let this be a warning to the patriots and anti-communists of the North facing similar threats to their Republic.

Dr. Carlos Casanova is a Professor of Law at the Pontifical University of Chile in Santiago. He has taught philosophy and law at other universities in Chile, as well as universities in the United States and Venezuela.