With this Sunday in the second round of the presidential elections in Chile, the lawyer and former ultra-Catholic deputy José Antonio Kast He has become the first openly Pinochet leader to come to power in the country since the return to democracy and has joined the wave of far-right leaders who currently govern in several Latin American countries, such as Argentina and El Salvador. At just 22 years old, when he was a law student at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, he participated in the television programs of the 1988 plebiscite campaign, defending the continuity of General Augusto Pinochet at the head of the country.
Decades later, in his first attempt to reach La Moneda, seat of the Chilean Government, the current president-elect left a phrase that summarizes his link with that past: “If he were alive, he would vote for me,” he stated in 2017, in reference to the dictator. Since then, Kast has repeatedly defended the political and economic legacy of the dictatorship and has questioned the consensus built after the return to democracy.
Founder and leader of the Republican Party, Kast, 59, will take office on March 11 with a markedly neoliberal program, focused on sharp cuts in public spending and a tough policy against crime and irregular migration. His arrival to power is unprecedented in Chile, although not in the region. Until now, the only right-wing president since 1990 had been Sebastián Piñera, who governed for two non-consecutive terms and voted against Pinochet remaining in power.
“Kast is a figure directly linked to Pinochetism. He is heir to its tradition,” political scientist Octavio Avendaño, from the University of Chile, told EFE Agency, who also remembers that he is the brother of Miguel Kast, who was Pinochet’s minister during the dictatorship and former president of the Central Bank, considered a reference for the most neoliberal right.
Unlike his previous campaigns in 2017 and 2021, Kast has opted this time for a more contained strategy and has avoided publicly displaying his sympathy for the military regime or his more ultra-conservative positions on individual freedoms, such as abortion or the morning-after pill. Father of nine children and a fervent Catholic, he chaired the organization Political Network for Values, an international network that defends conservative postulates on family and life. Although he assures that his convictions “have not changed,” he has insisted that he will not focus his mandate on the so-called “cultural battle,” but on what he defines as “the urgent needs of Chileans.”
His main electoral promise has been the creation of an “emergency government” to face what he considers the country’s biggest security crisis. Among its proposals are mass expulsions of migrants in an irregular situation, greater police deployment, the shielding of the northern border with fences and ditches and the classification of irregular migration as a crime. During the campaign he even warned that migrants without papers “have 98 days to leave Chile.”
Kast is no newcomer to politics. He was a deputy for 16 years for the Independent Democratic Union (UDI), the heir party of Pinochetism, which he abandoned before running as an independent candidate. In 2019 he founded the Republican Party, with which he lost to Gabriel Boric in the second round of 2021 and subsequently led the second and failed constitutional process of 2023.
“In the second constitutional attempt it was incapable of assuming a State solution and allowing a consensus Constitution to emerge,” researcher at the Elcano Royal Institute Carlos Malamud told EFE. “He wrapped himself in the blanket of puritanism and values,” he added. Along the same lines, political scientist Cristóbal Rovira, from the Catholic University, has pointed out that Kast “created his own party arguing that he remained the same and that those who had been moderating were the parties of the traditional right.”
An admirer of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Kast differs from other ultra leaders in the region by less disruptive ways than those of Donald Trump or Javier Milei, although his events have not been lacking in caps with the Trumpist slogan “Make America Great Again.” With political ties to Vox in Spain, it has managed to engulf the traditional Chilean right grouped in Chile Vamos and consolidate itself as its main reference.
The unknown now is what type of Government it will form as of March and whether it will choose to rely on its toughest sectors or to approach the traditional right to seek consensus in a fragmented Parliament without clear majorities.
