Chile’s New Far-Right President is Slashing the Culture Budget
6March 24, 2026
Chile’s freshly-inaugurated president, the far-right politician José Antonio Kast, has announced a budget cut of 3 percent across all ministries; this is just one facet of what Kast calls his“emergency” government, which he believes is necessary to address the country’s alleged economic and security crises. This budget cut slashes the funds allocated to Chile’s Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage. According totheArt Newspaper, the culture ministry already ranks 16th in terms of budget.
This is a hard pivot from the policies of Chile’s last president, who made an attempt to increase the Ministry of Cultures’ budget to the equivalent of 1 percent of all public spending, theArt Newspaperreported. As it stands, Chile’s culture ministry’s budget currently stands at an equivalent of $580 million for 2026, up from $310 million for 2023.
Kast’s government is “a government with no cultural program. That’s for sure,” Bárbara Negrón, the general director of Chile’s Observatory of Cultural Policies, told The Art Newspaper. “It’s been decades since that happened, that a government takes office without a cultural program.”
In a DOGE-like fashion, each Chilean ministry was also instructed to submit a report identifying any misuses of public funds to the Ministry of Finance’s budget office by March 20.
It’s also highly likely that Kast—who’s been called the country’s most conservative leader since Pinochet—will implement a crackdown on immigration and increase military presence at Chile’s borders. On Sunday, thousands marched in Santiago in protest of Kast’s rollback of dozens of environmental decrees.
“Our work, our memorials, our history, it’s all at risk,” Gerson Ramírez Guajardo told NPR. “I think we are all concerned about what is to come.”