José Antonio Kast’s election marks the first time since Chile’s return to democracy that an admirer of the dictatorship has reached the presidency. The implications run deep.

General Augusto Pinochet, the strongman who imposed a reign of terror on Chile from 1973 to 1990, must be smiling in his grave.

His brazen defender and admirer José Antonio Kast has just been elected president of Chile. Kast, a right-wing politician who has praised the military dictatorship and once said that if Pinochet were alive “he would have voted for me,” won by an overwhelming margin on Sunday, beating his centre-left opponent by about 16 points. It is the first time since democracy in Chile was restored 35 years ago that any supporter of the dictatorship has won such high office.

Kast’s victory is not necessarily a public endorsement of his veneration for Pinochet. His campaign promises appealed to an angry, weary and confused populace eager for radical change: a vow to expel hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants, a crackdown on crime and narcotrafficking, a pledge to slash government spending and boost economic growth. Kast, an ultraconservative Catholic, also opposes abortion, same-sex marriage, gender identity protections and Indigenous rights.

Some might call his rise just one more alarming case of a worldwide trend toward nativist authoritarianism – and it is. But the attendant rehabilitation of one of the continent’s most infamous autocrats is a particularly agonising setback in a country where many considered the long struggle for democracy to have been won.

In 1973 the military, with Pinochet at the helm, overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. The general proceeded to close Congress, torture and........

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