Salvador Unlike ex-US President Donald Trump, he does not incite against minorities. He doesn’t have a military background like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. And he’s not an over-the-top libertarian like Javier Milei in Argentina. But the 55-year-old lawyer of German descent José Antonio Kast is clearly the new climber among the right wing candidates on the American continent.
In the presidential elections in Chile on Sunday, he did best in the first ballot with around 28 percent of the vote, ahead of the left opposing candidate Gabriel Boric (26 percent). “We now have to choose between democracy and communism,” Kast shouted into the cameras that evening in the diction of the global right. His opponent Boric is making common cause with communists and terrorists.
Kast, who speaks the German language, owes the first round victory to his radicalization in recent weeks. In September he was still in fourth place.
The conservative attorney is well known in Chile’s politics. He has wanted to become president of the country twice. He was a member of parliament four times before he founded his Republican Party two years ago, modeled on the USA under Trump. Kast is rooted in the international Catholic Schoenstatt Movement, he is a family man and has nine children.
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Now he has started to express himself more radically: Yes, he is right-wing, but without complexes, he suddenly declared. “What’s right-wing when I’m proud of Chile’s successes over the past 30 years?” He asked.
Kast warned the Chileans against a left-wing dictatorship like that under the Castros in Cuba. He wants to stop migrants with a ditch on the northern border of the country, he wants to use the military against the rebellious indigenous Mapuche in the south and abolish the laws that allow abortion in a few cases.
With these right-wing populist slogans, Kast has succeeded in collecting the votes of the Chileans, who are increasingly unsettled about the latent social unrest and the increasing propensity for violence among the population. Many Chileans are also suspicious of the current reformulation of the constitution.
Voter base among the Pinochet sympathizers on the right
As recently as April, the people had voted for a constitutional assembly that was largely left-wing – but many Chileans do not understand what socially progressive theses are being discussed there. Crucial for Kast’s good performance, however, is his traditional voter base among Pinochet sympathizers on the far right.
The fact that he has repeatedly spoken positively about the dictator in recent weeks has not hurt him – on the contrary. The general, who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990, is still popular with many middle-class and business-class Chileans because of his liberal economic reforms.
Runoff election for Chilean presidency
Kast can convincingly play off his ideological closeness to Augusto Pinochet: his father was a former German Wehrmacht officer who came to Chile after the Second World War with a Red Cross ID after burning his Wehrmacht papers.
His parents once explained that in an interview. The Chilean journalist Javier Rebolledo also described this in a book about the entanglements and the proximity of the Kast family to the dictatorship.
Accordingly, Miguel, the oldest of the ten siblings who was born in Germany, was Minister and Central Bank President under Pinochet. He belonged to the troop of liberal economists, the Chicago Boys, who were supposed to apply Milton Friedman’s neoliberal doctrine in practice for the first time in the Andean country.
Another brother, who now runs the family-owned food company “Cecinas Bavaria” south of Santiago, is said to have helped the Chilean secret service DINA with interrogations and investigations after the coup on September 11, 1973.
The connections to the dark chapters of Chilean history have so far not harmed Kast. But now he has to try to conquer the political center in order to convince in the runoff elections on December 19th. That could be easier for him than for the leftist Boric, in whose party coalition the Communist Party will prevent any signal to the center. “Trust yourself, Chile!” (Atrévete Chile) is Kast’s election slogan.
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