José Antonio Caste has never made a secret of being a fan of Pinochet. "If he were alive, he would vote for me," he once said. The new president of Chile is close to Donald Trump and his MAGA movement
Right-wing politician Jose Antonio Cast won the second round of the presidential election against the leftist Janet Hara, the electoral commission announced Chile.
According to official results, the 59-year-old candidate of the Republican Party won about 58 percent of the vote. Hara won almost 42 percent and conceded defeat. "Democracy spoke clearly," she wrote on the X network, after congratulating Kast on the phone, writes DW.
"Chile wants change," Caste told supporters in the capital, Santiago de Chile. "And I'm telling you, yes, Chile is going to experience real change."
Thousands of people took to the streets of the capital of Santiago de Chile and other cities of this country South American countries to celebrate Kast's victory. Many wore the Chilean flag and red caps emblazoned with the words "Make Chile Great Again."
With this, Chile faces the biggest shift to the right since the end of the military dictatorship August Pinochet in March 1990. After the victory of the Christian Democrat Rodrigo Paz in Bolivia in August and the triumph of Daniel Noboa in Ecuador in October, Chile is the next South American country to experience a profound political change.
A lawyer by profession, Kast won the most points in the campaign by topics migration and crime - issues that, according to polls, worry Chileans the most. Although Chile is still considered one of the safest countries in South America, crime rates have risen in recent years. Cust promised to deploy the military in certain neighborhoods, erect walls and trenches on the borders, and speed up deportations.
He also announced the expulsion of all migrants without valid documents and the formation of a rapid intervention unit modeled after the American ICE service.
The father of nine children announced that he wants to abolish the liberal law on abortion in Chile, although polls show that the majority of citizens oppose it.
The cast maintains close ties with the MAGA movement Donald Trump in the USA. He was a guest at the Republican CPAC conference several times and is considered an admirer of the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Like the Trump administration, the 59-year-old promises drastic cuts in government spending and the state apparatus.
Kast comes from an influential and numerous family that fled from Germany to Chile after World War II.
Several of his nine siblings were, like him, members of parliament or senators, and one brother was president of the Central Bank and a minister during Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship.
His father, Michael Kast Schindele, was a lieutenant in the Wehrmacht, a member Hitler's youth and later NSDAP. During the war, he fought in the Soviet Union and Italy, where he was captured by American troops.
He managed to escape from captivity and first took refuge in Talkirchdorf in Bavaria, where he met his future wife, Olga Rist Hagspiel. Michael Kast Schindele managed to acquire a false identity and tried to get a certificate of denazification, but it was refused, so the ultra-conservative Catholic, with the help of the Vatican, fled to Chile through the so-called "rat channels". In Chile, he founded the "Cecinas Bavaria" sausage factory in Buin and became a respected member of the community.
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