November 9, 2017. Chile prepares for the first round of the presidential elections and José Antonio Kast (1966) faces what would be the first of three attempts to reach The Coin and take the reins of government. A year and a half earlier he had resigned from the traditional center-right party, the Independent Democratic Union (UDI), and now, as he appears on radio and television channels, he does not hide his vision of the country’s recent political history.
“I think so, that [Augusto Pinochet] would vote for me“If he were alive, I think so,” he says calmly and sure of his answer. Following the dialogue with the journalist present, he decides to go even further, establishing a contrast between the dictatorship and the last government of Sebastian Piñerawho governed the South American country twice and died a little over a year ago after a helicopter accident in Lake Ranco, where he used to go on vacation in the summer.
“I am very direct, I think that Pinochet made a qualitative leap so that someone like Sebastián Piñera could develop a program. Separating the issue from human rights, Pinochet’s government for the development of the country was better than Piñera’s”, he adds.
Time progressed and his criticism from the right towards the sector to which he once belonged continued and in some cases intensified, as when he stated, shortly after the social outbreak and the constitutional process that ended in a dead letter, that the businessman’s administration was the worst since that of Salvador Allende.
What were previously unambiguous criticisms, last Sunday night, just minutes after the Electoral Service (Servel) confirmed his victory at the polls with more than 58% of the votes, became a tribute before the eyes of two of the sons of the former head of state. It is a change of style that was not limited only to his opinion regarding Piñera’s legacy, but also to some of his value definitions, such as divorce, abortion and same-sex marriage. All of them hidden under the cloak of order and security.
Under the slogan of creating an “emergency government” to stop the alleged stagnation of the economy and the advance of delinquency and organized crime, José Antonio Kast, founder and leader of the Republican Partybecame the president with the most votes in the history of Chile. And he did it on his third opportunity, just like former President Allende, who is at his ideological antipodes and was elected in 1970, being assassinated in the Palace three years later.
Links with Nazism and the military regime
Catholic and the youngest of 10 children, the elected president of Chile is the son of Olga Rist and Michael Kast Schindle, who was member of the National Socialist German Workers Party. His father, who arrived in Chile in 1950, at the age of 26 after his country’s defeat in World War I, fought in France, Italy and in the Crimean peninsula during the war.
Although he started out as a soldier, his military rank reached lieutenant and despite his capture by US forces, he managed to escape in April 1945, after jumping from the second floor of the school where he was detained. Although his first destination, after leaving his nation, was Argentina, Chile ended up being the definitive option when it came to settling and start a family.
The truth is that the political roots of the new president are not limited only to his father, since the eldest of his brothers, Miguel Kastalso made a tour on the public stage. First, collaborating with the Christian Democratic Party (PDC), the same one that hosted presidencies such as those of Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle or Patricio Aylwin. Later, from the Gremial Movement (MG) and the UDI, same groups that José Antonio himself would later join.
Elected president of the School of Economics and later general secretary of the Federation of Students of the Catholic University (FEUC), the eldest Kast decided to continue adding steps in the exercise of power. It was after the coup d’état of September 1973 that a call from one of his closest associates during his university studies dissuaded his aspirations to go to work in Mexico and he arrived in Mexico. Ministry of Planning (Mideplan) of the regime. He was also part of the so-called Chicago Boysa school that the economist Milton Friedman helped form in the United States, and led the Central Bank.
It was from those decisions that the fate of the Kast family and especially that of José Antonio, was seen. united with the work of Pinochet and his entourage. Not only because of family ties, but also because of the different positions that the elected president has had in defense of the armed intervention and the 17 years of government that followed afterwards. Along with voting “Yes” in the 1989 plebiscite, he has questioned the prosecution that certain soldiers, denounced for human rights violations, have had by the justice system. One of them, Miguel Krasnoff, today imprisoned in Punta Peuco.
right-wing rebel
As happened with the firstborn of the Kast-Rist family, José Antonio was trained in the Catholic University (UC)as a lawyer, and also actively cooperated with the Trade Union Movement, sealing a relationship of trust with who is recognized as the “intellectual father” of the Pinochet dictatorship. The founder of the UDI, drafter of the current Political Constitution and murdered in 1990 by left-wing terrorists of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMG), while leaving to teach law in a university classroom, Jaime Guzmán.
It was while he was at that university that Kast held various student positions, such as secretary of the Student Federation and representative to the Superior Council. He was also defeated in his attempt to preside over the highest student body.
The UDI, which Guzmán founded and which sponsored the failed candidacy of Evelyn Matthei in the last presidential elections, served as Kast’s political domicile until May 2016, when, preceded by two attempts to preside over the store and change the course of the community – which until then was headed by the so-called ColonelsJovino Novoa, Pablo Longueira, Andrés Chadwick and Juan Antonio Coloma –, decided to abandon militancy and undertake a new project. One that, first, translated into the Republican Action Movement and, second, in the Republican Partywhich brought him to the Executive Branch in March 2026 and which enjoys a significant bench of parliamentarians.
Always frontal towards the left and often without mercy with the center-right that he joined years ago, what is coming for the new president is, along with meeting the expectations that his next government raises in the citizens, convene groups that go beyond his political house in order to provide the governability that the country demands. The challenge seems immense and it will be the first months, it is noted, that will help mark your destiny.