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 Photograph/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 in the present day 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 up 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 in the present day.
“There are specific points which Kast will emphasize first, like immigration,” mentioned Claudio Fuentes, a political scientist at Diego Portales College in Santiago.
“He’ll take a really robust stand in controlling the borders, the place he’ll most likely improve the presence of the navy. Coping with this can be key to his success.”
Through the election marketing campaign, Kast, the ultraconservative Catholic father to 9 youngsters prevented 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.
Whilst Chilean society liberalized after the return to democracy in 1990 following Common 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 certainly one of Latin America’s most secure and most affluent nations.
All through his profession, Kast has steadily 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 social gathering 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 12 months as an unbiased, successful 8% of the vote, and in 2019 based the Republican social gathering on the inspiration of the “protection of human life since conception,” household values and the market economic 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 mentioned that if Common Pinochet have been nonetheless alive, the dictator’s vote would have been solid 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 Celebration, he left post-war Europe for Argentina earlier than ultimately settling in Chile.
However others in Paine — the place 70 folks have been forcibly disappeared beneath the Pinochet dictatorship, greater than in every other 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 historical past, it is all in danger,” mentioned Gerson Ramírez Guajardo, whose father was kidnapped and disappeared by troopers quickly after the 1973 coup d’état.
“I believe we’re all involved about what’s to return.”
