Chile’s President José Antonio Kast waves to supporters as he leaves Congress after his swearing-in ceremony in Valparaiso, Chile, Wednesday, March 11, 2026. (AP Picture/Gustavo Garello)
Gustavo Garello/AP
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Gustavo Garello/AP
SANTIAGO, Chile — José Antonio Kast has been inaugurated as Chile’s new president at this time at a ceremony within the coastal metropolis of Valparaíso. The far-right politician constructed his profession railing in opposition to liberal values from the fringes of Chilean politics.
Kast received a resounding victory over his leftist rival in a runoff in December, taking on 58% of the vote along with his hardline strategy to public safety and unlawful immigration.
His ascent to the presidency marks an abrupt departure from the progressive agenda of leftist Gabriel Boric, whose four-year time period ended at this time.
“There are certain issues which Kast will emphasize first, like immigration,” stated Claudio Fuentes, a political scientist at Diego Portales College in Santiago.
“He will take a very strong stand in controlling the borders, where he will probably increase the presence of the military. Dealing with this will be key to his success.”
Throughout the election marketing campaign, Kast, the ultraconservative Catholic father to 9 kids averted all point out of the hardline ethical agenda with which he has been synonymous over a greater than 30-year political profession, first as an area councilor after which as a congressman.
At the same time as Chilean society liberalized after the return to democracy in 1990 following Normal Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, Kast has maintained his place on the far proper, voting in opposition to the restricted legalization of abortion – and even divorce laws – throughout his time in congress.
Kast begins a four-year time period he has labeled an “emergency” authorities, citing what he says is a rising safety and financial disaster — whilst Chile stays one in all Latin America’s most secure and most affluent nations.
All through his profession, Kast has regularly courted controversy for his excessive views, together with his protection of the Pinochet dictatorship, which he campaigned to keep up in energy when the problem was put to a pivotal plebiscite in 1988.
In 2016, he left the right-wing Unión Demócrata Independiente get together after 20 years and three phrases in congress, saying that it had strayed too removed from its founding rules because the defender of the dictatorship’s legacy.
He ran for the presidency the next yr as an unbiased, profitable 8% of the vote, and in 2019 based the Republican get together on the inspiration of the “defense of human life since conception,” household values and the market financial system.
Throughout his 2021 presidential marketing campaign, the place he received within the first spherical however was defeated convincingly by leftist Boric within the runoff, he stated that if Normal Pinochet have been nonetheless alive, the dictator’s vote would have been forged in his favor.
In his native Paine, a quiet agricultural city simply south of Santiago, some residents bear in mind the Kast household fondly as a pious clan who constructed a profitable meat and restaurant enterprise.
Kast’s father, Michael Kast, was born in Germany and fought within the Wehrmacht. A member of the Nazi Get together, he left post-war Europe for Argentina earlier than ultimately settling in Chile.
However others in Paine — the place 70 individuals have been forcibly disappeared below the Pinochet dictatorship, greater than in another municipality in Chile — are much less optimistic in regards to the rise to energy of a supporter of the regime.
“Our work, our memorials, our history, it’s all at risk,” stated Gerson Ramírez Guajardo, whose father was kidnapped and disappeared by troopers quickly after the 1973 coup d’état.
“I think we are all concerned about what is to come.”
