The ultra-conservative former congressman José Antonio Kast has been elected as Chile’s next president.
With more than 99% of polling stations counted, Kast took 58.17% of the vote, against 41.83% for the leftist Jeannette Jara, a former labour minister under the current president, Gabriel Boric.
The son of a Nazi party member, an admirer of the dictator Augusto Pinochet and a staunch Catholic known for opposing abortion and same-sex marriage, Kast built his campaign on a promise to expel tens of thousands of undocumented migrants.
This was Kast’s third attempt at the presidency: in 2021, he was defeated by Boric in the runoff.
Although Jara won the first round in November, Kast’s victory had been widely anticipated by polls and because he was expected to inherit the votes of the other rightwing candidates, which far outnumbered those of the left.
Many analysts believe the ultra-conservative succeeded in addressing one of Chileans’ main concerns: rising violence, which has increased in recent years even though the country remains one of the safest in Latin America.
Over the past decade, the number of migrants has doubled, fuelled by about 700,000 Venezuelans forced to leave their country amid its economic collapse.
Kast repeatedly presented migrants as the reason for rising insecurity. During the campaign, he gave the roughly 330,000 undocumented migrants – most of them Venezuelan – an ultimatum to leave before the next president takes office on 11 March or be expelled “with only the clothes on their backs”.
His platform included a Trump-inspired plan to build detention centres and five-metre-high walls, electric fences and three-metre-deep trenches, as well as an increased military presence along the border, particularly in the north, on the frontier with Peru and Bolivia.
Although many analysts see the result as part of a broader rightwing wave sweeping South America – with victories this year in Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina’s midterms – many Chilean analysts also view Kast’s win as a continuation of the alternation of power between left and right since the country returned to democracy after the military dictatorship which lasted from 1973 to 1990.
Despite his sweeping victory, Kast will not command an absolute majority in Congress, neither in the lower house nor in the Senate, even when counting all rightwing parties together.
The ultra-conservative has pledged to cut public spending by $6bn within 18 months, but has not explained how he intends to do so.
“There are many things about what a Kast government will look like that we don’t know because he has not said how he will do them,” said Rossana Castiglioni, a political science professor at the Universidad Diego Portales.
“In terms of economic policy, it is very likely we will see adjustment measures typical of the right. But we have no certainty about how he will implement them … where there is far less uncertainty is on security policy, because that has been his workhorse throughout the campaign,” she added.
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