The Lies of President Kast: Analyzing His Public Accountability and Challenges for the Left

This administration is just 90 days in, not four years. The gap between promised actions and actual execution within these three months underscores the discrepancy between the fabricated narrative crafted to win elections and the underlying program set before the campaign began. The promises were mere cover for the real agenda.

2. The Three Promises and Their Translation

Kast’s 58% approval stemmed from three core promises. The first: no cuts to social benefits. We’ve already seen how that turned out.

The second promise was to expel 300,000 irregular migrants on the first day. The government assigned Bernardo Fontaine to map out the first 90 days, dubbed the “Challenge 90.” The result? Only 2,500 voluntary departures. A significant 61% of citizens believe this promise is impossible to fulfill. Moreover, 65% expect that most irregular migrants will still be in Chile by the end of 2026. When pressed on this uncomfortable promise, Kast dismissed it as a “metaphor.” However, 76% of surveyed individuals perceived it as a concrete commitment.

The third promise focused on immediate security. Yet in reality, 65.7% of citizens believe the government lacks a security plan. While 47.9% identify security as the country’s primary issue, the government has stated it will reuse the previous administration’s criticized security plan.

A network of 12 progressive think tanks analyzed the 440 measures in the government program and found that only one has been fully implemented: providing the Comptroller’s Office with more technological resources for conducting investigations. A startling 80% of the proposals show no progress whatsoever. The administration has already contradicted 30 of its own commitments, illustrating a deliberate selection between promises that serve the narrative and those that represent the real agenda.

The narrative drove the campaign, while the real program is the National Reconstruction Plan designed to benefit the richest 1% of Chile at the expense of the rest of Chilean families.

3. The Plan: The Largest Transfer in Decades

Under the guise of «reconstruction due to fires,» the government’s legislative proposal, which Congress approved with 90 votes in favor, includes the most ambitious regressive tax reform attempted in Chile since the dictatorship.

The cost of reconstructing homes affected by fires in Ñuble and Biobío represents less than 1% of the total project cost. The remaining 99% constitutes a systematic transfer of resources from the state to concentrated capital.

The components of this plan are threefold. A reduction of the first-category tax from 27% to 23% between 2026 and 2029. The reintegration of a tax system allowing large company owners to deduct 100% of credit against their personal taxes. Lastly, a 25-year tax immutability clause for projects over $50 million: the reinstatement of Decree Law 600 from the Pinochet dictatorship, which existed from 1974 until it was repealed by Bachelet in 2016, as if 40 years of history had never occurred.

The arithmetic here reveals that the fiscal loss from these measures is estimated between $4 billion and $4.7 billion annually, equating to 1.5% of GDP and 9% of total tax revenue. The majority of direct benefits will flow to the wealthiest 2% of the population. The Autonomous Fiscal Council acknowledges that the project will maintain a fiscal deficit until at least 2031.

Such a total fiscal loss could finance the entire Primary Health Care program, or more than twice the coverage of tertiary education, or build six complex hospitals like the one in Puente Alto, along with 50 CESFAM and over 100 police stations. Instead, the funds will not reach public services; they will line the pockets of shareholders in major corporations.

The report from the Institute of Labor Studies and the CUT, published on May 26, accurately describes the fiscal costs as immediate and real; the benefits in investment and employment are uncertain, delayed, and dependent on private decisions that the project neither mandates nor verifies.

A study analyzing 18 OECD countries over 50 years found that five years following significant tax cuts for the wealthy, growth and unemployment were virtually identical to those in countries that did not implement such cuts. The only metric that rose was the income share of the wealthiest 1%.

Kast proposes in 2026 the same recipe that has failed for half a century globally, with the distinction that this time he intends to shield it for six administrations with the immutability clause. No elected government will be able to modify it. Citizens may vote every four years; investors will enjoy 25 years of certainty.

4. Environmental Deregulation: The Silent Third Pillar

Less discussed than the tax reduction, yet equally structural, the environmental component of the Reconstruction Plan reduces the timeframe to challenge environmental decisions from two years to six months, restricts precautionary measures against projects with approved permits, allows the SEIA to dismiss public service observations that “exceed their competencies,” and compensates project holders when a court nullifies their permits, creating an open-ended fiscal liability.

In his public accountability address, Kast proudly claimed that May 2026 marked Chile’s highest approved investment amount in 11 years: $13.9 billion. He failed to mention that a significant portion of this “approved investment” stemmed from expedited resolutions of stagnant applications due to the very deregulation he instituted.

Communities that fought for a long time to retain the right to contest environmental decisions are now losing that right. Investors gain legal certainty for 25 years. The lithium that the Global North requires for its electric vehicle batteries is extracted from Mapuche territory and northern highlands without the protective mechanisms that were previously in place. Kast has branded this as “growing and caring are not opposites.” The territory bearing the cost of this growth might describe it differently.

5. The Vandal Registry: Classism Named

The most revealing announcement in the public accountability address didn’t get the most media coverage. Kast announced the creation of the Vandal and Incivility Registry. Those who have attacked police, blocked public transportation, damaged national monuments, consumed drugs in public, or vandalized public and private property “will lose social benefits like free education, guaranteed universal pension, or rental subsidies.”

This measure has a name in political theory. It exemplifies what neo-reactionary theorists call the neo-cameralist model: the state as a corporation, citizens as customers, and customers who violate usage terms lose access to services. What distinguishes this Chilean version is its classist precision.

Vandalizing a wall without permission and assaulting a police officer yield the same consequence: loss of the guaranteed universal pension. Blocking public transportation to protest cuts to the PAE is an “incivility” that costs the benefit of free university education. This reflects a lack of legal proportionality. It converts the social rights fought for over a century by the working class into tools for political discipline, but with an important detail: if a wealthy individual commits the act, they will lose nothing, as their education, health, or pension does not depend on the state.

In effect, this is a law designed to discipline the poor—those who truly need it.

The National Union Commission of the Communist Party accurately documented this in their report from May 16-17: the government aims to instill the notion that labor rights are costs, regulation is bureaucracy, collective bargaining is rigidity, and union protection is privilege.

The Vandal Registry starkly illustrates this operation: it does not outlaw protest; it makes it prohibitively expensive. Those protesting the tax cut funding the fortunes of shareholders risk losing the pension that ensures their old age. Capital has found a more elegant formula than a club: the threat of dispossession.

6. The Public Accountability Address as Class Discourse

The public accountability address on June 1 deserves to be read twice. The first time as any citizen would read it. The second time as what it also represents: a class document. A text in which the interests of those controlling Chilean capital appear as a national interest.

The word that organizes the entire discourse is “emergency.” Kast used it more than 20 times. Chile is in a state of security emergency, an economic emergency, and a social emergency. This repetition forms the ideological structure justifying all the actions the real program requires without needing to pass through the democratic debate its cost would demand.

In the speech, responsibility connotes cuts, efficiency implies deregulation, opportunities refer to tax cuts, and unity signifies not questioning the framework. Gramsci characterized this process as cultural hegemony: the work of producing the common sense that makes the capital agenda appear to be the agenda for all. This serves as the primary conclusion of the presidential discourse.

A document was released on the same day as the public accountability address: the Preliminary Memorandum from the President’s Office for the communication team. It is the unvarnished speech. There’s no analysis of the country’s problems. Instead, phrases for spokespersons to repeat appeared: “responsibility to address the problems we received, hope to look ahead”; “Chile needs less petty fighting”; “security will remain the government’s central focus.”

This memo serves as the map of hegemony: the positioning slogans in their raw state before the presidential narrative dresses them in statesmanlike rhetoric. In that vocabulary, “responsibility” is merely the name given to dispossession.

One moment in the speech encapsulates the cynicism of the project. Kast announced having uncovered “payments for undelivered rations and irregular contractual changes” in JUNAEB and concluded, “The best defense of programs like school feeding is ensuring that not a single peso is lost along the way.”

The government that identified the PAE as one of 142 programs to cut presented itself to Congress as its defender. The accusation of corruption against the previous administration turns the cut into protection. This is the local version of shock doctrine: leveraging the scandal of prior management to install the perception that the actual program is the problem.

7. What Polls Measure

The Pulso Ciudadano poll from the last week of May, immediately preceding the public accountability address, positioned Kast with a 31% approval rating and a 53.3% disapproval rating. Cadem reported him with 39% support and 56% rejection. Furthermore, 52.6% of respondents from Activa Research indicated they have “little to no trust” in the President.

The trend over time reveals more than the specific number: it showed a 47.5% approval rating in the first half of March, dropping to 34.7% in the second half, then to 33.3% at the beginning of April, and down to 29.1% in the latter half. The partial rise to 31% in May does not reverse a 16-point drop over two months.

Despite security being the central theme of every official discourse, 65.7% believe the government lacks a security plan. Additionally, 55.1% reject the privatization of Codelco, 54.7% the privatization of ENAP, and 54.3% oppose privatizing BancoEstado. The opposition bloc has reached 29.6%, its highest level since Kast took office. Notably, 40.9% of citizens do not identify any minister as good, and Jorge Quiroz, the minister most frequently named as the worst in the cabinet with 26.9% negative mentions, is the same individual who designed the tax reform benefiting the wealthiest 2%.

What those numbers measure is not the fatigue of a clumsy government. They reflect the chasm between what people thought they were voting for and what they actually voted for.

The 47.5% who approved of Kast in March did not vote for cuts to the PAE, for the 25-year tax immutability, or for Decree 333 regarding health. They voted for order, for the expulsion of migrants on the first day, and for assurance that social benefits would remain untouched. All three promises are currently dismissed as metaphors, hyperboles, or misunderstandings.

8. The World of Work the Discourse Ignores

The public accountability address mentioned unemployment, informality, and precariousness as legacies from the previous administration but failed to acknowledge what reports from the Communist Party and the CUT documented this week with verifiable data.

The report from the National Professional Commission, presented just three days before the public accountability address, identifies a phenomenon termed “illustrated unemployment” by the OCEC UDP from Diego Portales University: the unemployment rate for individuals with complete higher education has reached 8.9% in the first quarter of 2026, the highest recorded rate, excluding the pandemic, and the only segment where unemployment has risen in the past year.

Among those aged 29 or younger with higher education, the unemployment rate reached 17%. More than a third of those who completed higher education work in positions not requiring their qualifications, resulting in a 38% loss of income for university, master’s, or doctoral degree holders.

The Union Report documented that informality impacts 27% of the workforce: over 2.5 million people lack contributions, collective rights, unemployment insurance, and protection against dismissal. Some 82% of the population identifies as part of the working class, while 55% consider themselves in low or lower-middle strata. Kast’s government offers this majority a tax cut that excludes them and a Vandal Registry that threatens them.

The FIEL-CUT report posed a question the official discourse never addresses: with the $4 billion to $4.7 billion the Reconstruction Plan costs the treasury annually, the entire Primary Health Care program could be financed. Or more than double the coverage of tertiary education, or nearly the entire Guaranteed Universal Pension, or multiple instances of the Family Ethical Income.

The young individuals with university degrees who drive for Uber due to a lack of suitable jobs, the informal workers sustaining social reproduction without contributions or rights, and the children whose school feeding depends on whether Quiroz decides not to cut it—all of them bear the cost of a reform designed for those who do not need them.

9. The Question the Left Cannot Evade

A program so blatantly regressive achieved 58% of the votes in December 2025. This figure cannot be solely explained by the effects of fear, misinformation, or media manipulation. It demands an honest response from the left that has been avoided.

The first part of that response is structural. Chilean capitalism has spent decades creating material conditions that the far-right translates into political capital: precariousness, insecurity, indebtedness, illustrated unemployment, rents consuming 40% of income, and frustration over social mobility expectations. None of these conditions were created by Kast; they stem from a model that no previous government transformed structurally.

The Communist Party’s union report articulated this bluntly: the working class’s tendency to vote for options like Parisi or, worse, the right, is not a problem of “poor fascists” or declassing. It’s a matter of the party’s insertion into those labor realities.

The second part is the self-critique the left needs but too often postpones. The previous government administered Chilean capitalism with slightly more distributive justice, but without disputing the property relations that reproduce it.

Rents continued to rise because urban land remained a private speculative asset. The AFP system continued to transfer workers’ pension savings to the capital markets. The concentration of income in the upper decile did not substantially change. Tax reforms were left halfway.

Improvements were real regarding access to rights but not in structural transformations. When capital decided it no longer needed moderate managers, it sought those who could administer without concessions.

Rosa Luxemburg articulated this moment with the clarity it requires: when reform becomes the horizon and not the instrument, the left transforms into the moderate fraction of capitalist administration. Capitalism, unlike the left, has an excellent memory and knows precisely what to do with its moderate managers when it no longer needs them.

10. What Needs to Be Done

The assessment of 90 days and the public accountability address yield two simultaneous tasks for the left that must not be conflated.

The first is strategic and concrete resistance. Defend the PAE not as an achievement of the previous government but as a constitutional right to food.

Reject the 25-year tax immutability not only as a poor fiscal investment but as a renunciation of democratic sovereignty over economic policy.

Challenge the Vandal Registry not merely as a specific excess but as a structural criminalization of protest that transforms the exercise of political rights into a threat against social rights.

This resistance is urgent and necessary. The FIEL-CUT report provided the Senate with five concrete proposals: separate processing, fiscal neutrality, additional employment, municipal protection, and transparency. These are the minimum positions from which to engage in dialogue, yet we must not lose sight of the fact that what the government least desires is dialogue.

The second task cannot wait for the first to conclude: construct the historical project that does not confuse the defense of democratic rights with the horizon of emancipation. The left that shouts “defend the institutions” without stating their purpose is responding on ground chosen by Kast.

The response demanded by the situation differs: the democracy that Kast inherited was already insufficient, its institutions designed ultimately to guarantee the reproduction of capital, and what needs to be built is not the liberal democracy that neo-reactionarism challenges, but a real democracy that no representative of concentrated capital can tolerate.

This real democracy includes workers’ control over their production. Control of inhabitants over the territories they inhabit. Collective planning over common goods and collective consumption. Urban land organized for those who inhabit it, not for those who speculate on it. Natural resources managed for present and future generations, not auctioned off to investors with guarantees of 25 years.

Another element is the Latin American coordination of leftist movements. Kast visited Milei as his first international trip because the capital he represents coordinates globally. This should challenge us since the left responding solely from national projects faces an asymmetry of scale that no programmatic virtue can offset.

The capital that governs openly from La Moneda does not intimidate us. It returns the question that we always should have answered and too often postponed in the urgency of defending what capital allowed to stand. Now that it decides to take that too, the urgency to build what we never had, the unity of the left with the people, and a genuinely transformative program is the only viable political response.

Daniel Jadue (Santiago, 1967). Architect, sociologist, writer, and Chilean communist politician. He has a distinguished career in municipal and popular domains, characterized by implementing cutting-edge public policies aimed at de-commodifying basic social rights and democratizing access to common goods. He is the author of various publications analyzing political discourse, social geography, and history, addressing transformations in contemporary capitalism, digital control systems, and liberation processes of oppressed peoples.

NOTE

(1) From a political economy perspective, a tax reform is regressive when the tax burden disproportionately falls on lower incomes, forcing the working class to allocate a significantly greater percentage of their income toward tax payments (as occurs with VAT or consumption taxes, which directly impact those without saving capacity); conversely, a reform is progressive when it adheres to the principle of fiscal justice, increasing tax rates as wealth rises, so that large capital and high-income sectors contribute a geometrically larger proportion through taxes on super-wealth or corporate profits, transforming the fiscal apparatus into a tool for redistributing surplus.

La entrada The Lies of President Kast: Analyzing His Public Accountability and Challenges for the Left se publicó primero en El Ciudadano.