Lawyer and former Member of the Chamber of Deputies of Chile José Antonio Kast has been elected Chile’s president with 58% of the vote.
Commentators say he won because of his efficiency in addressing Chile’ problem of rising organized crime: what he called “great firmness in confronting all those who harm us”.
In the past ten years, the numbers of migrants has doubled as 700,000 Venezuelans sought refuge from Venezuela’s economic collapse in Chile. Kast has targeted the undocumented migrants and given them an ultimatum to leave of their own accord “if they ever want the chance to return”, or be expelled.
His election platform involved detention centres and increased military presence along Chile’s frontier with Peru and Bolivia.
This is the third time he runs for president, and received acrimonious or cryptic congratulations from former president Boric, who said that he believes that Kast “will at some point come to understand what the loneliness of power means”.
In 2021, the same Gabriel Boric accused Kast of double standards: “Migrating is a right and sometimes it is also a tragedy. Your father himself was a migrant after having fought in the Nazi army”.
Meanwhile, Argentina’s far-right president, Javier Milei, expressed his pleasure at the idea of “freeing ourselves from the oppressive yoke of 21st-century socialism.”
Brazil’s pacific leftist president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said he “will continue working” with the Chilean government to strengthen relations between the two countries and to ensure “the preservation of South America as a zone of peace”.
Chile has always switched between right and left — at least since its dictatorship ended in 1990. Anyway, Chile’s constitution does not allow the president excessive power. But he has promised to take it upon himself to cut public spending by $6bn within the next year and a half.
In the 2017 election, Kast only received around 8% of the vote, so the change of heart in Chileans in the past decade deserves closer inspection.
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