José Antonio Kast won the presidential runoff with 58.1 percent to Jeannette Jara's 41.8 percent, an official count that followed an election held under compulsory voting for the first time and marked by a rise in blank and null ballots.Kast, 59, a conservative former lawmaker from the Republican Party whose campaign promised a hardline crackdown on crime, stricter immigration controls and economic revival, ran nostalgic advertising that evoked a Pinochet-era "golden age" and a slogan suggesting that "in the evening you could go home safely," messages that reached about 7.2 million people on election day.Domestic and international reactions ranged from praise for the transparency of the count from Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and vocal support from Javier Milei to sharp condemnation from Gustavo Petro, while analysts and historians including Marco Moreno, Henrik Brandão Jönsson, Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser and Gennaro Carotenuto warned about a fragile economy, a polarized society, likely congressional and judicial pushback and concerns about ties to Donald Trump and regional destabilization as Kast will take office on March 11, 2026.