Pepe Auth

Pepe Auth
Member of the Chamber of Deputies
In office
11 March 2018 – 11 March 2022
Preceded byCreation of the district
Succeeded byClaudia Mix
ConstituencyDistrict 8
In office
11 March 2010 – 11 March 2018
Preceded byÁlvaro Escobar
Succeeded byDissolution of the District
President of the Party for Democracy
In office
10 May 2008 – 30 December 2009
Preceded bySergio Bitar
Succeeded byAdriana Muñoz D'Albora
Ambassador of Chile at Sweden
In office
8 September 2000 – April 2004
Preceded byJosé Goñi
Succeeded byÁlvaro García Hurtado
Personal details
BornJosé Auth Stewart
(1957-03-06) 6 March 1957 (age 69)
Santiago, Chile
Party
SpouseTita Rojas
Children6
Parent(s)Raúl Auth
Joan Stewart
Education
Occupation
ProfessionSociologist

Pepe Auth Stewart (born José Auth Stewart; 6 March 1957) is a Chilean politician, sociologist and political commentator. He served as a member of the Chamber of Deputies for three consecutive terms between 2010 and 2022, representing District 20 and later District 8 of the Santiago Metropolitan Region. Earlier in his career, he was Chile's ambassador to Sweden between 2000 and 2004 and president of the Party for Democracy (PPD) between 2008 and 2009. Since leaving Congress in 2022, he has worked as a political columnist and television commentator, notably as a panelist on Tolerancia Cero on CNN Chile.

Early life and education

Auth was born at the Hospital San Borja in Santiago, Chile, on March 6, 1957, the fifth of six siblings — four older half-siblings on his mother's side and one younger sister. He is the son of physician Raúl Auth Caviedes and Joan Stewart Visintainer. His mother, who was of English descent, grew up on Dawson Island in the far south of Chile, and between the ages of nine and twelve Auth himself lived in Tierra del Fuego, where his father practiced medicine at an oil camp of the state petroleum company ENAP in Cerro Sombrero.

He completed his secondary education at the Internado Nacional Barros Arana between 1969 and 1973.

Auth studied Animal Sciences and Veterinary Medicine at the University of Chile and also completed five semesters of Psychology at the same institution. In 1981, he was expelled from the university by the military-appointed rector due to his participation in the student movement.

He later participated in the Young Researchers Program in Social Sciences at FLACSO-Chile, where he took part in the program during 1982 and 1983, and in the first Social Sciences program of the Academia de Humanismo Cristiano, where he also worked as an assistant to professor Manuel Antonio Garretón.

Auth pursued doctoral studies in sociology at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris between 1983 and 1986, under the supervision of sociologist Alain Touraine. He obtained a Diploma of Advanced Studies qualifying him to pursue a doctorate, equivalent to a Master of Arts degree.

Additionally, he took part in the Sociological Intervention Training Workshop led by Michel Wieviorka in Paris; electoral campaign workshops organized by the Pablo Iglesias Foundation of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party in Madrid and the Olof Palme Foundation of the Swedish Social Democratic Party in Stockholm. He also completed training visits to the United States on primary elections and campaign financing sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, to Auckland to study state modernization at the invitation of the Government of New Zealand, and to Japan to observe the general functioning of the state, invited by its government.

Professional career

Auth was a fellow of the French government and a member of the research team at the Centro de Estudios Sociales SUR during the 1980s, across two periods interrupted by his studies in Paris. There, he participated in programs on education for democracy, political studies, and the development of focus group interview techniques, and created a youth studies area that promoted research on youth issues. He later served, until 2000, as managing partner of the social-research and public-communications consultancies Ítaca Consultores and, subsequently, Authente Consultores, advising companies, trade associations, and political figures on public identity and communication strategies.

He has authored numerous essays on youth issues during the 1980s and later on political and electoral topics. He edited the book of autobiographies of Chileans in Sweden, Con Chile en el Corazón, and published a compilation of essays with Editorial Catalonia titled Pasiones y Convicciones. Autobiografía intelectual (2009). In 2018 he published Sin Sombrero. Selección de intervenciones en el Hemiciclo, a compilation of his speeches from the floor of the Chamber of Deputies.

He frequently participates in political analysis and debate programs on radio and television and, from 2013, hosted a weekly segment on Mondays on the program Conectados con Agricultura on Radio Agricultura.

Political career

Party for Democracy

Auth is a founding member of the Party for Democracy (PPD), joining its first elected National Directive in 1990. He served as the party's parliamentary campaign chief in 1993, national vice president between 1996 and 2000, secretary-general, and later as party president between May 2008 and December 2009, when he resigned following the Concertación's defeat in that year's presidential election.

He served as Ambassador of Chile to the Kingdom of Sweden between 2000 and 2004, during the presidency of Ricardo Lagos.

He later worked as an advisor to the Ministry of the General Secretariat of the Presidency, director of the Electoral Studies Program at Fundación Chile 21, consultant for the National Democratic Institute, and head of the advisory team for the PPD parliamentary caucus in the Chamber of Deputies.

Chamber of Deputies

Auth was first elected to the Chamber of Deputies of Chile in the 2009 parliamentary elections, representing District 20 (Cerrillos, Estación Central and Maipú) for the 2010–2014 term. During this first term he sat on the permanent committees on Finance and on Housing and Urban Development, and between 2011 and 2014 he headed the PPD deputies' caucus. He also served as president of the Chilean–French interparliamentary group and of the PPD's parliamentary committee.

He was elected deputy again in 2013, becoming, according to the party, the most-voted deputy nationwide, representing the same district for the 2014–2018 term. From March 2014 he shared the leadership of the PPD caucus with fellow deputy Jorge Insunza. During this term he sat on the permanent Finance Committee, which he chaired from March 2015 to April 2017, as well as the Sports and Recreation Committee and the Committee on Micro, Small and Medium Enterprise, Consumer Protection, and Tourism; he also sat on the Special Budget Committee in 2014 and 2015. He took part in several special investigative committees, including those examining alleged irregularities in the Electoral Service's (Servel) oversight of private contributions to parliamentary and presidential campaigns, and the conduct of the Internal Revenue Service and the Superintendency of Securities and Insurance regarding the Grupo Penta case and its donations to political parties and universities. He also represented the Chamber abroad, including at a special session of the Andean Parliament in Bogotá in February 2015, a health-commission meeting of the Latin American Parliament in December 2016, and a delegation visit to the Congressional Budget Office of the U.S. Congress in November 2017.

On May 2, 2016, he formally resigned from the Party for Democracy after 28 years of membership, citing the party's departure from its founding identity. On March 21, 2017, he joined the Mixed and Independents Committee in the Chamber, leaving the PPD deputies' committee. He later joined the Radical Party caucus, remaining there until December 2019, when the party's general council requested his immediate expulsion after he voted against the constitutional accusation against President Sebastián Piñera, which ultimately failed.

In the 2017 parliamentary elections, he was elected deputy for the newly created 8th electoral district of the Santiago Metropolitan Region as an independent candidate for the 2018–2022 term, obtaining 26,839 votes, equivalent to 6.33% of the total valid votes. During this final term, he sat on the permanent Finance Committee as well as the committees on Emergency, Disasters and Firefighters, and on Water Resources and Desertification. He served on special investigative committees examining alleged irregularities in Army procurement processes (2018); the actions of public agencies related to the state port sector; the water-contamination emergency in Osorno; and the actions of the Interior and National Defense ministries during the 2019 state of emergency (2019). In June 2018, he was part of the parliamentary delegation that attended the eighth session of the Pacific Alliance Interparliamentary Monitoring Commission (CISAP), held in Colombia. From March 19, 2019, to April 7, 2020, he served as second vice president of the Chamber of Deputies, under the presidency of deputy Iván Flores García and the first vice presidency of deputy Loreto Carvajal.

In January 2020, he joined the Christian Democratic Party of Chile caucus as an independent.

He did not seek re-election in the 2021 parliamentary elections. Law No. 21,238 of 2020 established term limits allowing deputies to be re-elected consecutively for up to two terms.

Later career as political commentator

After leaving Congress in 2022, Auth largely stepped back from party politics and reestablished himself as a political analyst, columnist, and television commentator. He became a weekly columnist for the news outlet Ex-Ante, writing regular analysis of Chilean electoral and political developments, and also contributed opinion pieces to Radio Bío-Bío. In March 2025, he joined the panel of Tolerancia Cero, the political debate program broadcast by CNN Chile, alongside journalists Mónica Rincón and Daniel Mansuy, marking his first regular role as a television panelist.

In July 2025, he published Política sin trinchera, a compilation of 38 of his columns examining the 2019 social uprising, the failed constitutional processes, the government of President Gabriel Boric, and recent Chilean elections; the book, launched at the former National Congress building in Santiago, inaugurated a new publishing imprint by Ex-Ante and Editorial Catalonia.

Personal life

Auth is married to Tita Rojas and is the father of six children. In 1997, he legally changed his given name from José to Pepe so that it would appear this way on ballot papers, as this is how he is popularly known.

Works

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Pepe Auth". Wikipedia (Spanish edition) (in Spanish). Retrieved 5 September 2026.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 "Pepe Auth Stewart". Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional de Chile (in Spanish). Retrieved 10 February 2026.
  3. 1 2 "Pepe Auth Stewart". Wikipedia (Spanish edition) (in Spanish). Retrieved 5 September 2026. Estudios
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "Pepe Auth". Wikipedia (Spanish edition) (in Spanish). Retrieved 5 September 2026. Carrera política
  5. ↑ "Pepe Auth lanza su candidatura al PPD". Radio Universidad de Chile (in Spanish). 10 May 2010. Retrieved 5 September 2026.
  6. ↑ "Diputado Pepe Auth renuncia al PPD". Radio Universidad de Chile (in Spanish). 30 April 2016. Retrieved 5 September 2026.
  7. ↑ "El transversal lanzamiento de "Política sin trinchera", de Pepe Auth, el primer libro de la colección Ex-Ante/Catalonia". Ex-Ante (in Spanish). 3 July 2025. Retrieved 5 September 2026.
  8. ↑ "El transversal lanzamiento de "Política sin trinchera", de Pepe Auth, el primer libro de la colección Ex-Ante/Catalonia". Ex-Ante (in Spanish). 3 July 2025. Retrieved 5 September 2026.
  9. ↑ "El ingreso de Pepe Auth a Tolerancia Cero y la salida de Fernando Paulsen". Ex-Ante (in Spanish). 21 March 2025. Retrieved 5 September 2026.
  10. ↑ "Pepe Auth presentó su libro "Política sin trinchera" junto a Lucía Santa Cruz, Pablo Longueira y Eugenio Tironi". Ex-Ante (in Spanish). 3 July 2025. Retrieved 5 September 2026.
  11. ↑ "¿Quién es Pepe Auth Stewart? Fue el ideólogo de las dos listas de concejales. Se peleó con Camilo Escalona. Se llamaba José, se cambió a Pepe". Cambio21. Archived from the original on 6 May 2008. Retrieved 10 February 2026.