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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 towards liberal values from the fringes of Chilean politics.
Kast gained a resounding victory over his leftist rival in a runoff in December, taking up 58% of the vote along with his hardline method 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 sturdy stand in controlling the borders, the place he’ll most likely enhance the presence of the navy. Coping with this might be key to his success.”
In the course of 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 a neighborhood councilor after which as a congressman.
At the same time as Chilean society liberalized after the return to democracy in 1990 following Basic Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, Kast has maintained his place on the far proper, voting towards 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 continuously courted controversy for his excessive views, together with his protection of the Pinochet dictatorship, which he campaigned to take care of in energy when the difficulty 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 yr as an impartial, 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 gained within the first spherical however was defeated convincingly by leftist Boric within the runoff, he mentioned that if Basic Pinochet had 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 keep 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 Occasion, he left post-war Europe for Argentina earlier than ultimately settling in Chile.
However others in Paine — the place 70 individuals had 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 come back.”
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