The Shadow Chile Chose

“Dictatorships are one-way streets.

- BY NILANTHA ILANGAMUWA

José Antonio Kast

Democracy boasts two-way traffic,” wrote Alberto Moravia, the Italian novelist and journalist who knew fascism not as theory but as lived suffocation.Winston Churchill, less subtle but equally alert to human frailty, reminded us that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried. Here we confront a brutal truth: democracy is noisy, reversible, and humiliatingly slow, while authoritarianism offers speed, clarity, and silence. When societies tire of argument, they often mistake silence for order. Chile has just done so again.

Chile’s welcome of José Antonio Kast into La Moneda in Santiago is not a sudden lapse of judgment nor a collective bout of historical amnesia. It is something far more unsettling: a recognition, half-conscious and deeply conditioned, of an old arrangement that never quite went away. Kast, who won the 2025 Chilean presidential election with about 58 per cent of the vote in the runoff against Jeannette Jara on December 14, 2025, embodies the return of a ruler who praises Augusto Pinochet's “order” and treats the dictatorship as a regrettable necessity rather than a criminal rupture. This is not a break with Chile’s post-1990 story but a continuation of it. The past was never buried; it was merely repainted.

Kast is often described as an aberration, an imported virus from the global far right. This is both comforting and false. He is native to Chile’s modern order. Born in 1966, he belongs to the generation raised during military rule, trained politically in parties that served the junta faithfully, and rewarded by an economy shaped through force. His father's biography is no footnote. Michael Kast was a member of the Nazi Party and served in the Wehrmacht before leaving Europe through Catholic escape routes that ferried defeated collaborators into Latin America.