Chile's conservative president, José Antonio Kast, is under pressure only eight months into office, with approval at 24%, as a fuel crisis and street protests mount, NPR reported from Santiago. Kast, who spent a career attacking progressive causes, reproductive rights and welfare policy from the hard right, won the presidency in December 2025 by avoiding those themes and campaigning instead on illegal immigration and public security. Rather than pressing that agenda, NPR reported, he has floundered, and a rising cost of living has hit him as it has other leaders in the Americas. "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," Echavarría said, with heavily armed police behind him. The demonstrations are a test of a president who presented himself as a law-and-order outsider and is now being judged on prices, fuel and a set of social measures critics say he did not campaign on. NPR described an ultraconservative leader on the back foot, not a completed impeachment or a fall of the government.

Kast's path to the office was built on two issues that had dominated Chilean media: immigration and security. Eight months later, the report says, those are not what is driving people into the street. Fuel and the cost of living have moved to the center, and protesters are also listing environmental rollbacks, human-rights concerns and criminal-sentencing changes they argue were not on the ballot in the way pocketbook issues now are. A 24% approval rating, if the polling cited holds, is a steep drop for a new presidency and a warning about how quickly a mandate can narrow.

The verified picture is a protest, a poll number, and a presidency under strain. It is not a forecast that Kast will leave office, and it is not a full audit of every decree he has signed. It is a Saturday dispatch from Santiago about a government already fighting on terrain it did not choose. On Friday, NPR reported, the strike was broken after the government backed down and sent a bill to Congress that would reverse planned fuel-price rises. The bill is expected to be approved this month, but anger over the cost of living has not faded. Patricia Pereira, a 30-year-old veterinarian at the Santiago march, said she was worried about cuts to science funding and more besides. "Here in Chile, it was a hard-won victory for children to have free education, achieved through protests, and now even that's also being called into question," she said. Kast's budget proposal is moving through Congress with sought cuts to education, culture, science and a host of social programs. Similar pressure is falling on other leaders in the region who have aligned themselves with President Donald Trump: in Argentina, Javier Milei faces reelection in less than a year with 60% disapproval amid spiraling inflation, and in Peru an Ipsos poll put President Keiko Fujimori's disapproval at 53%.