José Antonio Kast had seen it coming. “Our ideas already won — they won in the United States, they won in Italy and they won in Argentina,” he said on Chilean radio one day after President Trump’s inauguration in January. “We are going to win, too.”
This Sunday, he finally did. Mr. Kast was elected as Chile’s president on his third try, scoring a resounding victory against his leftist opponent and pushing the country decidedly to the right as Chileans’ sought iron-fisted solutions to increased violence and illegal immigration.
Mr. Kast, a stern father of nine with deep ideological roots in conservative Catholicism and economic neoliberalism, belongs to a global right-wing movement that has risen to power around the world by prioritizing strict law and order and sealing borders. He obtained 58 percent of the vote on Sunday.
“Chile cannot get used to fear, and Chile cannot get used to fire,” he said in his victory speech on Sunday night. “Chile will be free from crime again.”
Mr. Kast has embraced an expression, “Chileans first,” that mirrors Mr. Trump’s America First slogan, and promised to build a physical barrier at Chile’s northern border, which a significant number of Venezuelan migrants have crossed in recent years.
He spoke at a summit of the Conservative Political Action Conference in Hungary this year, praising the country’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, and railing against multiculturalism and political correctness. And this month, Mr. Kast met with the security minister of El Salvador, whose president, Nayib Bukele, has drawn praise for his harsh crackdown on gangs, even as he has been accused of human rights violations.
Some of the things he heard in the meeting, Mr. Kast said, “could eventually also be applied in Chile.”
Yet of leaders across the world, Mr. Kast “has the greatest affinity with Giorgia Meloni, by far,” said Rodolfo Carter, a Chilean senator and spokesman for Mr. Kast’s campaign.
Mr. Kast’s 7,000-mile tie with Italy’s prime minister, whom he met in September and called a few weeks ago, suggests a clear strategy that analysts say was instrumental to Mr. Kast drawing broader support and mounting a victorious campaign.
Like Ms. Meloni, Mr. Kast was once a fringe candidate considered too extreme. Like Ms. Meloni, whose party was born from the ashes of Italy’s bloody experiment with fascism, Mr. Kast has a fraught relationship with his country’s brutal history of dictatorship. And like Ms. Meloni, he has recently sought to downplay his most hard-line positions to appeal to mainstream voters.
Unlike his previous runs for office, Mr. Kast — who declined to be interviewed for this story — avoided mentioning some of his more contentious positions, like opposing abortion or the day-after pill, instead leaning on a more widely popular platform of law and order and clamping down on illegal migration.
“Kast understood very early that these two issues were driving people crazy,” said Claudio Fuentes, a Chilean political scientist, “and he was able to focus on them.”
A spike in violent crime in Chile in recent years linked to the penetration of international criminal networks propelled security to the forefront of the voters’ concerns.
Mr. Kast visited Chile’s most crime-ridden areas and promised strict measures, including by announcing a countdown for migrants to self-deport or be deported.
As the Kast government prepares to take on organized crime, said Mr. Carter, the campaign spokesman, “there will be casualties.’’
Mr. Kast has also promised to slash the federal budget, though he has not said specifically what would be cut.
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While Mr. Kast’s priorities are similar to Mr. Trump’s, Mr. Carter flatly rejected any comparisons. “We are not falling into this trap,” he said. “We are not the caricature of the right.”
Mr. Kast called for unity and respect in his victory speech on Sunday, urging Chileans to get together to resolve what he called a national state of emergency, adding that he will be the president of “all Chileans.”
Yet critics are skeptical that Mr. Kast’s political strategy to soften his image is anything more than a temporary facade.
“We all know who he is,” said Sergio Aguiló, a socialist politician and longtime former lawmaker who served with Mr. Kast in Chile’s parliament.
Mr. Kast, a career politician, was born in Santiago to German immigrants. His father, Michael Kast, fought in the German Army during World War II.
After a Chilean reporter posted a document showing that his father was a member of the Nazi party, Mr. Kast rejected the claim, saying that he was just a conscripted soldier in the Nazi army and that both he and his father abhorred Nazism. His brother, Miguel Kast, was a minister during Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship, which killed and disappeared thousands of people.
Mr. Kast has been active in politics since he was a law student at Chile’s Pontifical Catholic university in Santiago. He was a follower of Jaime Guzmán, a law scholar who was one of the main ideological architects of the Pinochet dictatorship.
In the late 1980s, Mr. Kast, while at the Catholic university, campaigned in support of continuing Chile’s military dictatorship, a proposal that voters rejected in a plebiscite.
Over the years, he has acknowledged the human rights violations, but has continued to express a measure of support for the dictatorship. The military government “did a lot of good things for human rights,’’ Mr. Kast said in 2017, citing improvements to Chile’s economy under Mr. Pinochet.
Some of his supporters seem to agree. Recent opinion polls show that in recent years, the number of Chileans unequivocally condemning the dictatorship has fallen, with a growing number of people thinking that the dictatorship did both good and bad.
“We need an iron fist like when Pinochet was here,” said Erika Moscoso, who voted for Mr. Kast and lives in the northern Andean village of Cariquima. “Here we lived calmly.’’
Mr. Kast avoided mentioning the military’s dictatorial rule during the campaign and stayed away from some of the core religious themes that have defined his political career.
After he was elected a lawmaker in 2001, Mr. Kast stood out for his work on educational and family issues. He founded the “parliamentary front for life” — a group of lawmakers focused on opposing abortion and promoting traditional values — and also opposed the sale and distribution of the day-after pill.
“Those were the themes that motivated him the most,” said Pablo Longueira, a prominent conservative politician, who called him a “person of solid principles.”
Mr. Aguiló, the veteran lawmaker, said he used to joke with Mr. Kast about his intransigent positions that stood out even within Mr. Kast’s party, which was the furthest to the right in the country at the time.
“I didn’t imagine there could be someone even more to the right than your colleagues,” Mr. Aguiló remembered telling Mr. Kast.
Mr. Kast broke away from his party in 2016, and later started a new one, the Republican Party, based around the principles of the “defense of human life since conception,” family values and the market economy.
He publicly talked about how he and his wife did not use contraceptives and in 2022 he became the president of the Political Network for Values, an international anti-abortion organization that, according to its website, promotes strictly heterosexual marriage and “the right of parents to decide the education of their children,” and opposes euthanasia.
In an election debate this year, Mr. Kast said he had not changed his mind on his core values, but decided to stress what he thought were more important matters for Chileans — safety, jobs, and economic growth.
Mr. Kast had already began talking about the issue of security in 2021, at the onset of Chile’s increase in killings and as a significant jump in illegal immigration had taken hold. But at the time, the country was emerging from enormous demonstrations calling for equality and social justice and it elected a left-wing president, Gabriel Boric, whose campaign platform spoke to those concerns.
Now, a recent Ipsos poll shows that 60 percent of Chileans want the government to prioritize reducing crime.
“Kast already had credibility on those themes,” said Patricio Dussaillant, a media strategist who advised Mr. Kast during his 2021 campaign, referring to crime and immigration. “The difference is that these issues were not on the political agenda. And now they are.”
John Bartlett and Pascale Bonnefoy contributed reporting from Santiago.
Emma Bubola is a Times reporter based in Rome.
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