Kast, “Chilean Bolsonaro”, confirms favoritism and is the new elected president of Chile

Right-wing candidate José Antonio Kast was elected president of Chile, after a significant victory over communist candidate Jeannette Jara.

With 95% of the votes counted, Kast has 58% of the vote, compared to 41% for Jara, who last month was the candidate with the most votes in the first round.

Jara admitted defeat.

“Democracy has spoken loud and clear. I just spoke to President-elect José Antonio Kast to wish him success for the good of Chile,” she wrote on her Twitter account.

These are the first presidential elections in Chile where voting is compulsory.

Kast appears to have capitalized on the transfer of votes from right-wing candidates defeated in the first round, after obtaining the support of libertarians Johannes Kaiser and Evelyn Matthei, representatives of the more traditional right.

Among the uncertainties surrounding this election was the fate of the votes of the more than five million Chileans who were forced to vote for the first time.

In this context, lawyer José Antonio Kast, leader of the far right and founder of the Republican Party, ran for the third time for the presidency with a “hard line against crime” program, focused on security and the fight against illegal immigration, as well as on reducing public spending.

Jara, former Minister of Labor in the current government, represented an alliance that brings together all sectors of the Chilean left and center-left.

She reached the second round after winning the first, with a message focused on better access to social protection programs and measures to deal with security and immigration issues, two priorities for Chileans.

Both tried to win the support of voters who consider themselves closer to the political center, during a historic election marked by strong antagonism between the social models that each defends.

But Kast, on his third attempt, was the undisputed winner and confirmed Chile’s shift to the right after four years of left-wing government under Gabriel Boric.

“He won a clear victory,” Boric admitted to Kast during the traditional telephone call between the outgoing president and the president-elect.

Kast will take power on March 11, 2026.

Born 59 years ago in Paine, in the Santiago metropolitan region, Kast is the youngest of ten children of a German couple who emigrated to Chile after World War II.

The wartime past of his father, Michael Kast, has been the subject of controversy.

Kast claimed that his father enlisted in the German army under duress to avoid possible military trial and execution.

“Our family history is as far from Nazism as one can imagine,” he said during the 2021 campaign.

However, later journalistic investigations revealed that Michael Kast was a member of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party at the age of 18, according to a 1942 document from the German Federal Archives.

Although there are doubts as to whether they are the same person, the place and date of birth coincide with those of the father of the Chilean candidate.

Married to lawyer María Pía Adriasola, with whom he has nine children, and close to the conservative Catholic movement in Schoenstatt, Kast has also rejected the “far-right” label often attributed to him.

However, he defends the military regime of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) and even declares that if Pinochet were alive, he would have voted for him.

His older brother, Miguel Kast, was a minister and president of the Central Bank under the military government, a regime that committed serious human rights violations, including torture, murders and the disappearance of thousands of people.

Kast has denied tolerating such abuses, although he has also sparked controversy since his first presidential campaign by saying, for example, that “many things were done for the human rights of others under the military government.”

He also argued that, unlike what happened in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, Chile experienced a “transition to democracy” under Pinochet.