Chile’s Kast faces growing protests as fuel prices soar and approval plunges : NPR

SANTIAGO, Chile — Chile’s ultraconservative president finds himself on the back foot after just eight months in power.

José Antonio Kast, a politician who spent a career railing against progressive issues, reproductive rights and welfare policies from the extreme fringes of right-wing politics, now finds himself with just 24% approval in the polls.

It is less than a year since Kast stormed to the presidency in December 2025 by avoiding all mention of his hardline stances on social matters, focusing instead on two hot-button issues whipped up in the national media: illegal immigration and public security.

But rather than pressing ahead with those at the top of his agenda, he has floundered. And as elsewhere around the Americas and worldwide, rising costs of living have come to hit him hard.

“Our salaries are maybe 20% of a European income, but with a similar cost of living – it’s terrible,” said Simón Echavarría, a 30-year-old architect, at a march in Santiago on Friday evening.

“We want to protest against the measures that have set us back on environmental issues, on human rights, even reducing the sentences of pedophiles – they are implementing things that nobody asked for,” he said.

Behind him, heavily armed police blocked the streets and fired water cannons at protesters chanting and waving flags in the square.

Much of the recent ire stems from the revelation last month that Kast’s government had signed decrees to cut the sentences of 56 prisoners whose crimes range from the rape of children to dictatorship-era human rights violations.

Kast has since admitted that this was an “error”, but came out in support of the undersecretary who signed the decrees nonetheless.

But beneath the more egregious moves Kast has made in his first year in power is simmering discontent over affordability.