Conservative Wins Chile Presidential Election

Chile has elected its most Right-wing president since the Pinochet dictatorship fell, with the conservative Jose Antonio Kast defeating his communist rival.

Kast won 58.2 per cent of the vote in a victory that harnessed voter anger over crime and migration to drive the country into its most dramatic Rightward shift in decades.

Kast is a son of a Nazi party member who fled to Chile after the Second World War.

The father-of-nine ran for his self-founded Republican Party of Chile, defeating communist candidate Jeannette Jara, who took 41.8 per cent of the vote.

Speaking on Monday, the president-elect promised to build a government of “national unity” and to “safeguard institutions.”

“We all share concerns about security, health, education, and housing,” he said. “This is not one person’s or one party’s government. It will be broader to achieve consensus on fundamental issues.”

His success makes Chile the latest nation in Latin ‍America to tilt Right after Bolivia’s election in August and Javier Milei’s success in Argentina’s midterm vote in October.

Inspired by Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration, Kast has vowed to build border walls and form a specialised police force modelled on US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to track down and deport migrants in the country illegally.

He has pledged to build a trench on the northern border to help stem migration from countries such as Venezuela.

Last year he visited the mega-prison system built by El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, and said he would copy the model. He has also visited other Right-wing leaders, including Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Hungary’s Viktor Orban.

After winning all 16 regions of Chile, Kast will take office on March 11, vowing an “emergency government” to crack down swiftly on irregular migration and cut taxes and public spending.

While Chile remains one of the safest countries in Latin America, an influx of organised crime has led to a rising murder rate and hurt economic growth, with a recent spike in high-profile incidents such as kidnappings and assassinations.

“Changes will start immediately,” said Kast in his victory speech at his Santiago headquarters. But he warned that “it will require perseverance”.

The Trump administration was quick to praise the election winner. Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, said: “Under his leadership, we are confident Chile will advance shared priorities to include strengthening public security, ending illegal immigration and revitalising our commercial relationship.

Kast’s father was a Nazi party member and army lieutenant who fled to South America after the Second World War, where he eventually founded a lucrative sausage business south of Santiago. Kast has said his father was a forced Nazi conscript.

His eldest brother, Miguel Kast, ‍was a government minister and central bank president in the early 1980s under the Pinochet dictatorship, during which more than 40,000 people were executed, detained and disappeared, or tortured.

As a law student, Kast campaigned for the “yes” vote in a referendum ‍on whether Pinochet should remain in power in 1988 – a vote that Pinochet lost.

After serving as a congressman for the Right-wing Independent Democratic Union party for more than a decade, Kast stepped down in 2016 to pursue ⁠the presidency as an independent but ended up winning less than 10 per cent of the vote. He gained more traction in 2021, running under the banner of his self-founded Republican Party.

His style is quite different to that of Milei ‌or Bukele, Nicholas Watson, the Latin America managing director at Teneo, told Reuters.

He said: “He is⁠ much less flamboyant and more reserved. He is also more of a political insider; he has ‍not burst onto the political scene in the way that Milei did.”

David Altman, a political scientist at Chile’s Pontifical Catholic University, added that Kast had benefited from a growing rejection of the incumbent government led by Gabriel Boric, the Leftist president.

Altman said: “It’s not that people became more fascist in the space of four years. People abandoned the Left and, as there essentially was not a political centre, they went Right. It was the only place where they could land.”