Special envoy to Santiago de XileChile has elected José Antonio Kast (Santiago de Chile, 1966), 59 years old, as its president for the next four years. An ultra-conservative Catholic, the son of a member of the German Nazi party and defender of the coup d’état against the government of Salvador Allende led by Augusto Pinochet in 1973, a coup he considers an episode in history starring “men and women who stood up to prevent the Marxist revolution in our land”. The elected president is the first in a democracy to openly defend the dictatorship that lasted until 1990, with 40,000 victims of torture, political imprisonment, murder and disappearance.
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Kast is the youngest of ten children of Michael Kast Schindele and Olga Rist Hagspiel, German immigrants who arrived in Chile during the 1950s, after World War II. Affiliated with the Nazi party and a German soldier, José Antonio Kast’s father acquired the rank of lieutenant after fighting in several battles between France and Italy, and was captured by an American unit. He managed to escape to Bavaria, his hometown, where he met his wife and from where he fled to Argentina, first, and then to Chile. Olga Rist would arrive later, with her first two children, Michael and Barbara. The family settled in Buin, south of Santiago, and opened a sausage factory, Bavaria, which still operates today.
The first-born of the Kast family, Michael, was part of the Chicago Boys, the group of Chilean economists behind the neoliberal economic reforms implemented in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship – privatizations, reduction of the role of the State and restriction of public spending – which, although they opened the Chilean economy to the world, entailed a very high social cost, with a drastic increase in unemployment and poverty, and bank bailouts by the state. Michael also served as Economic Officer of the Intelligence Area, as Minister of Labor and President of the Central Bank during the Pinochet regime. He died of cancer in 1983, aged just 34.
In politics since I was young
Michael Kast’s political life had a great impact on his younger brother, José Antonio, who inherited the firstborn’s good relationship with Jaime Guzmán, one of the most influential men in Chilean politics in recent decades; ideologue of the 1980 Constitution, promulgated under Pinochet’s government, and finally killed by a left-wing guerrilla in 1991. While Kast was studying law at the Pontificia Universidad Católica, Guzmán urged him to join the Independent Democratic Union (UDI), a party founded by himself in which a doctrinal, ultraconservative and Pinochetist right was articulated that today forms part of the Chile Vamos political coalition. After 20 years of militancy, José Antonio Kast left to start his own political path.
In 2017, Kast was a presidential candidate for the first time, with the support of the fledgling United Faith party, linked to the evangelical world, and came in fourth place with 7.9% of the vote. Two years later he founded the far-right Republican Party, with which he ran for president in 2021, in an election he lost to Gabriel Boric, the young former student leader who capitalized on the mass protest movement of 2019 against the high cost of living. Four years later, and in his third attempt, José Antonio Kast has won the presidency of Chile, and has become the first president in a democracy to openly acknowledge that he voted for Augusto Pinochet’s continued rule in the 1988 plebiscite, where the no it prevailed with 55.9% of the votes and Chile entered a phase of transition towards democracy.
“Kast is not one outsider –says the sociologist Rodrigo Medel to the ARA, but it comes from the bowels of a Pinochetist party founded during the dictatorship”. According to the analyst, this “brings it closer to the right-wing ideological voter, who can be found in all social classes and who has gradually become an orphan of representation”, because the traditional right has gradually moderated its speech, with former conservative president Sebastián Piñera (2010-2014 and 2018-2022) as the last representative of this process. “Piñera always declared himself an opponent of Pinochet and was a promoter of free university and equal marriage”, values with which Kast disagrees. Although in this campaign he has left his ultra-conservative agenda in the background to focus on insecurity and immigration, it is known that Kast defends religious and moral values in public policy: father of nine children and member of The Apostolic Movement of Schönstatt – which conceives the figure of Mary as a point of reference for approaching Christ – defends the traditional family, is against abortion in any case and opposes same-parent adoption, sex education and the so-called “gender ideology”.
