Chile and the incompetence of the anti-authoritarian left

Chile is a country located in Latin America, with a far-right-wing government that is putting all Chileans at great risk. How did we get here? To answer that question, we first need to understand what happened between 2019 and 2025 and how the people's disappointment with reformist leaders helped the right wing rise to power.

In 2019, a social uprising broke out in Chile. Many say it happened because the government raised the prices for public transportation, but that was just the last straw. We wanted a new constitution and to finally break free from our fascist past. Little did we know that this was the beginning of the end for all of us. What started as a revolutionary act to liberate the masses ended up being the last nail in the coffin.

Although Chile is an extremely capitalist country, we have won many social programs over the years, including scholarships for universities, PGU, and programs for minority groups such as the indigenous peoples and the disabled. We thought we were finally progressing, but now, with the current administration, these social programs will either be defunded or discontinued.

Gabriel Boric and Carolina Toah, and how their policies destroyed the left.

From 2022 to 2026, Gabriel Boric was the President of Chile, and Carolina Tohá was the Minister of the Interior of Chile. During that period, they made many mistakes, but the 3 most serious ones were:

1. Their hypocrisy in international politics

2. Doing everything they possibly could to be anti-authoritarian

3. Disappointing the masses.

First, when the presidential elections were happening in Venezuela, and the results were revealed, most countries in Latin America (including Chile) said that it was rigged. In fact, it took less than a day for that administration to condemn the results. That same year, Ecuador was also having presidential elections, and the results were as suspicious as Venezuela's, but Boric’s stance was completely different. Instead of questioning or condemning Ecuador’s results, he congratulated the new “president” almost immediately; since both results were equally suspicious; then it’s not about defending democracy but something else entirely.

We must ask ourselves. What political interests does Ecuador represent that Venezuela doesn’t?¹ Before I answer that question, there is another example that shows their double standard. On this continent, most countries use the same electoral system, except for a few; two well-known examples are Cuba and the United States. While Boric and his administration heavily criticised Cuba for not having an electoral system that elects its president directly and constantly calling it a dictatorship, he didn’t seem to care that in the US, they also don’t elect their president by popular vote because of their electoral college. We can tell there is a contradiction because you cannot say that one is a dictatorship and the other isn’t when both of them don’t choose their president by popular vote. A great example is the 2016 election, where Trump won, but Hillary won by popular vote.

Now let’s look at the countries that are labeled as dictatorships (Cuba and Venezuela), both of which happen to be enemies of the US government, and conveniently happen to be the only countries (in Latin America) to either nationalise their natural resources or to have anti-imperialist policies. It’s almost as if there is a link between being a sovereign nation and being labelled as a dictatorship.

That link is the key to answering our original question¹, since both of those countries represent a threat to capitalist hegemony, the US has tried everything it possibly can to destroy them, including political isolation. But that raises the question of whether Chile is a sovereign country if it is doing the empire’s work.

Anti-authoritarianism is not only the most ineffective strategy any left political movement could have, but it’s also the most dangerous one, because in the end it will always help the fascists rise to power, and that was demonstrated in 2022 when we were voting for a new constitution.

The social revolt, in a way, was successful because it allowed us to vote for a new constitution. The constitutional process demonstrated the ineffectiveness of the anti-authoritarian left to stop fascism. The right wing spread so many lies against this new constitution that one would think, since we have a left-wing president, surely, he would do something about this outrageous situation. WRONG, he did absolutely nothing that would stop the propaganda; some of his colleagues spoke about the lies the right-wing were pushing, but CLEARLY that wasn’t enough. The campaign to discredit the new constitution included posters on the main roads, fake summaries of the constitution, and spreading fear among voters (saying that if the new constitution were approved, we would end up like Venezuela), among other things.

Since the new constitution was rejected, people were either beyond disappointed or brainwashed, but both results led to the same thing: people were abandoning the left and embracing fascism, thinking that what wasn't achieved by the left would be achieved with the fascists.

Doing nothing to stop the right wing got us nowhere. Now in 2026, both in the Congress and the Senate, the majority of politicians are right-wing, meaning that the opposition can’t stop the fascist agenda of this government; they are basically useless. But let it be known that they are useless, not because they are powerless; they are powerless because they are useless. If they had created a united front against fascism and avoided being anti-authoritarian, none of this would have happened.

Jeannet Jara, the fear of communism, and the betrayal of her “allies”.

One would assume that ever since the end of Pinochet's dictatorship, Chile would take Germany's road, and a few things would have been implemented, such as for example punishment for the corporations that helped the regime, banning of the political parties that helped Pinochet, or changing the constitution. Unfortunately, none of those things happened. Since we inherited the system that was created to fight a communist uprising, there was no reason to believe that the anti-communist propaganda would stop functioning. The 2025 election showed that we haven’t moved on from the dictatorship.

During the election campaign, interviewers showed greater concern over Jara’s views on the governments of Cuba and Venezuela than her own political program. In fact, in each interview, they always asked her the same question, “Do you think Cuba is a dictatorship?”

During the center-left primaries, all the other candidates contributed to the fear of communism; for example, Carolina Toah said, “Whenever the communist party is in control, the country eventually becomes poor.” This is probably the most debunkable argument there is. In the world, there are only 5 countries that are being led by their respective communist party (China, Vietnam, Laos, DPRK, and Cuba). Out of those five, four of them are doing great economically; the one that is struggling is Cuba, but it’s not because of their own policies, but rather due to the 60 years of US-imposed economic blockade. With that being said, Toah was just feeding the anti communist machine because liberals will always side with fascists (whether directly or indirectly) over communists, so they can protect their own economic interests.

But the betrayal of her allies wasn’t the only reason why she lost; the right-wing parties and candidates (Kaiser and Kast) organised like never seen before.

Jose Antonio Kast and his strategy to win the elections.

As I mentioned above, the political parties that supported the dictatorship were not banned, instead they continued the work of the dictatorship with legislation and anti-communist propaganda, among other things. From 2021 to 2025, they had a unique strategy in which they discredited the new social democratic government; with the help of media, they made it seem that the government was the most radical left wing government there could ever be, meaning that anything even a little more left was absolutely impossible to achieve, like a communist president.

Additionally, Axel Kaiser, a right-wing public figure since the beginning of 2022, started spreading anti-communist propaganda and both praising the Pinochet fascist regime and the new “anarcho-capitalist” government of Javier Milei. If things couldn’t get any worse he then published a book called “Nazi comunismo”, in which he basically said communism and nazism were the same thing. Anyone with a basic understanding of politics knows that this is simply not true, but unfortunately that book became the bible for right-wing politicians not just nationally but internationally as well, and they use it to discredit left wing movemments (Javier Milei, the current president of Argentina has quoted directly from that book).

The brother of Axel Kaiser is presidential candidate Johannes Kaiser, he is not only an anti-communist man, but also a vehement misogynist. He has publicly stated that if a man sexually assaults (rapes) an “ugly” women, that man should receive a medal. On another occasion he questioned women’s right to vote, saying it was useless if they are not going to vote the “right way” (meaning that if they won’t vote for him). But how did this help Kast in the 2025 presidential election? The thing is, the regular voter doesn’t like anything that seems radical. A few years ago, Kast was seen as one of the most radical politicians there could be, but now, with the introduction of Johannes Kaiser, Kast is seen as the moderate one.

The other thing that worked in his favour was that Kast barely showed himself in public; he stayed quiet like a coward because he knew if he had talked, people would have been reminded of the horrible human being he truly is (he was also absent during a presidential debate because the communist candidate knew most of his policies were unachievable).

The other tactic they used was surprisingly infighting. There were 3 candidates from the right-wing: Jose Kast, Johannes Kaiser, and Evelin Matthei. During the first round of the 2025 presidential elections, they attacked Evelyn Matthei constantly; they made up stories that she had Alzheimer's, dementia, along with a slew of other mental illnesses.This was planned to make it seem as though she was unfit to become the next president. Nobody knew who was behind these allegations because they did it through online bots, but one day during an interview she said “I know exactly who is doing this to me and it’s Kast and his team”. The interviewer was shocked, and asked her if she was sure, to which she responded “ I am sure of it”. Later Kast acknowledged that it was true and that he was behind these cyber attacks against her. But one might wonder why they did this to her. The reality is, compared to Kast, she is a saint, so it was natural to think that the citizens would vote for her since she was the lesser evil.

Therefore, Kast left no room for error; he wanted to seem nice and moderate, so he found someone who would make him look moderate (Kaiser). He also wanted to look competent, so he made up these lies about the mental health of Evelyn; consequently, he became the perfect candidate in the eyes of the public.

“Chile is crumbling”, and how the TV pushed this narrative.

“Chile is crumbling” is a famous slogan created and spread by the right-wing. It upholds the narrative that Chile, from 2022 to 2025, became practically one of the poorest countries in Latin America (even though Chile was one of the strongest economies in Latin America at the time) But how did they convince the citizens? Well, it was simple; they used television! For context, all public TV channels are not only privately owned, but their owners are openly right-wing. Every time a robbery occurred, it made national news and was discussed for weeks, creating the narrative that the regular citizen was not safe anywhere.

People became impatient about the issue of safety, fixated not only on how unsafe they felt, but also how uncertain they were about their future; since Chile is “crumbling” surely our country could collapse at any moment. People were asking for change, but the left-wing parties were not going to provide that to the masses. As people became disillusioned and disappointed by this political sector they unfortunately embraced fascism, thinking that the problems we never had would be solved.

That is not to say that crime doesn’t exist in Chile; quite the contrary, it does exist, and remains a real problem. Still, crime is not as frequent as the propaganda machine made it seem. Furthermore, while we do in fact have economic problems, these problems are not because Chile is “poor”; it’s because the private sector controls basically everything, and as a result everything is expensive.

This administration and the main points of the big reform.

Now that we have talked about how we got to this point, it is time to talk about the fascist agenda of this current government. Right now, what this government is doing is discontinuing some taxes and reducing others to benefit the big corporations. What is their argument to support this decision? Well, in a nutshell Chile is broke, and we need new investment from private corporations, and although this might sound extremely ridiculous and informal, that’s literally what they shamelessly said.

Here is the problem: since they are reducing taxes from the bigger corporations (from 27% to 23%), we are raising less revenue than we originally did. The government said the losses would be compensated for by the economic growth that the country will have. No government can assure that they will do great economically; that is just a utopian way to think, but let’s just pretend everything goes according to their plan, which stipulates that Chile will have an economic growth of 2.5%yearly. The fact of the matter is that many economists have talked about this economic plan and have explained that for Chile to survive these cuts we should have an economic growth of 8% yearly. Clearly, the numbers don’t add up, so to compensate, they are going to either cut funding or discontinue many social programs.

In May, they signed an executive order that reduced the funding for hospitals and medical centers. The reality is that many hospitals and medical centers lack medical supplies, and on many occasions people have had to donate to these places so they can function. With these cuts, it will definitely worsen these conditions.

Another point that hasn’t been approved yet is scholarships. Chile has many scholarships so people from all walks of life can access college education. If you want to go further and get a master's degree or a doctorate, you may apply for another scholarship (national or international). What this administration wants to do is discontinue master's/doctoral scholarships and reduce the age for college scholarships to 30; therefore, if you are older, you cannot apply for a scholarship. There are class and gender issues with these possible reforms:

• Gender relations in Chile tend for men to perform productive labour while women perform reproductive labour; that being said, a few women are “breaking” these gender relations by performing productive labour after they have had children. They usually do this when they are around 30 years old. With this new age limit for scholarships, the most affected by these are working-class women, practically banning them from performing productive labour.

• In contrast to the bourgeois class, the working class is not able to afford a master’s or even a doctoral degree, meaning that those who wish to specialise will not be able to do so anymore, which is ironic because the children of the Chilean bourgeois class were able to get their doctoral degrees with scholarships from the state.

A key element in fascism is nationalism and the concept of the superior “race” (even though Chilean is not a race). This government is targeting two groups of people that are not part of the “Chilean race”: indigenous people and immigrants. They are targeting indigenous groups by both discontinuing the few social programs they have to protect their culture, and additionally making sure that more of their land is taken away from them.

The way they are targeting immigrants is through healthcare; some politicians want to demand that any school, university, or healthcare institution must ask immigrants their status (they want to know if they are legal or not), and to give that information to immigration, which puts them in a dangerous position. Since many immigrants that come to Chile are illegal, they are likely to avoid going to a medical senter so they don’t get deported.

Conclusion

The left is losing in Chile for a multitude of reasons. The fear of communism is incited by the right-wing, who also masquerade as more moderate candidates in order to gain voter support. The disappointment felt by the masses primes them to be susceptible to being brainwashed into believing that the country is collapsing.

The only possible way that Chile can survive these reforms is to organise an anti-fascist front that demands the abolition of the current state and establishes a new one that is anti-fascist, anti-racist, and anti-misogynist. A state that has a different constitution and a different electoral system.

If that doesn’t happen in 4 years, we will have another anti-authoritarian leftist who will implement reforms that may (or may not) improve the lives of citizens and after those four years, we will have once again a new right-wing politician.

And so the cycle continues.

-Vicente

Sources:

1) source