Kast Needs His Own Side to Pass His Security Reform. It Is Not Cooperating

Chile · Politics

A president with a mandate on crime cannot find the votes for his own crime bill, and the resistance is coming from his right.

José Antonio Kast won the presidency on a promise to get a grip on crime. Five months in, the Kast security reform is filed and the constitutional changes are on the table — and the people telling him no are not the left. They are the libertarians who helped put him there, and they are using the word totalitarianism.

Chile’s Congress in Valparaíso, where Kast’s eight constitutional amendments were filed on 17 August. (Photo internet reproduction)

What the Kast security reform actually proposes

The government filed eight constitutional amendments in the Senate on Monday 17 August, with the highest urgency classification Chile’s system allows. Kast had announced the package in a national address on 5 August and signed the text at La Moneda on 10 August.

The piece causing the trouble is a new constitutional state of exception, designed for serious threats to public security, that could run for up to eight months. Critics read that as a long suspension of ordinary rights with limited congressional consent along the way.

One thing the reform does not do, despite widespread confusion, is create a security ministry. Chile already has one, and Martín Arrau has run it since Kast took office.

The revolt is on the right

Johannes Kaiser leads the Partido Nacional Libertario. He ran against Kast in 2025 and then backed him, and his party’s votes are part of any governing arithmetic. He has now said the reform “includes the creation of a new state of exception that would last up to eight months without the consent of Congress, with extremely invasive restrictions on rights protected by the Constitution”, and that in the passage of the bill “limits will have to be put on this, or it will have to be rejected if it cannot be modified and left acceptable”.

His party colleague Vanessa Kaiser went further. She said she is not available to approve a project in which many of the proposals belong in ordinary law rather than in the constitution, and that normalising such a state of exception would mean “we would be living in a totalitarianism” and amount to a change of regime. The two later tied their support to a separate amnesty law.

From the traditional right, the UDI’s Guillermo Ramírez said that “under current conditions, the UDI cannot support the constitutional security reforms because they damage the institutional order”.

What Renovación Nacional actually did

This is where the story has been garbled in circulation. Renovación Nacional, the other large party of the Chilean right, did not dismiss the reform. On 19 August it filed amendments to the text and committed its backing, having earlier complained that the government had created unnecessary noise around the rollout.

RN’s Andrea Balladares put the party’s position plainly: “we have a text presented that still has plenty of doubts, there is room to improve it”, with specific concerns about restrictions touching constitutional guarantees such as health and education.

So the shape of the problem is not a right that has abandoned Kast. It is a right that will trade its votes for changes, from at least three directions at once, on a bill the government filed with maximum urgency.

Kast is short of the numbers

Constitutional reform in Chile needs supermajorities, and Kast is negotiating from a modest position. He responded to the criticism by trying to lower the temperature: “it surprises me that great debates are being generated on the basis of drafts”, he said, adding that it was positive for different voices to raise concerns about matters that worry them.

That is the language of a president who intends to amend rather than fight. The alternative — forcing a vote he might lose on his signature issue in his first year — is worse.

Why this matters if you live in Chile

If you live here, the immediate question is whether the emergency powers ever arrive, and in what form. A state of exception lasting up to eight months is not an abstraction: it changes what police can do, what courts review, and how long any of it lasts, in the place where you live.

The wider signal is about how this government will work. Kast has a mandate on crime and a legislature that will not simply hand him the tools. The pattern set here — file with maximum urgency, absorb criticism from allies, amend — is likely to repeat on pensions, on migration and on tax.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources: La Cuarta — Johannes Kaiser joins the rejection of Kast’s security proposal; El Mostrador — Kast moves his pieces with RN and UDI but remains far from the quorum; BioBioChile — RN files amendments and commits support; The Clinic — Kast on the security reform controversy