Kast Presidency begins, as Chile shifts to far-right : NPR

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Gustavo Garello/AP SANTIAGO, Chile — José Antonio Kast has been inaugurated as Chile's new president at present at a ceremony within the coastal metropolis of Valparaíso. The far-right politician constructed his profession railing in opposition to liberal values from the fringes of Chilean politics.

Kast received a convincing victory over his leftist rival in a runoff in December, taking up 58% of the vote together with his hardline method to public safety and unlawful immigration.

His ascent to the presidency marks an abrupt departure from the progressive agenda of leftist Gabriel Boric, whose four-year time period ended at present.

"There are specific points which Kast will emphasize first, like immigration," stated Claudio Fuentes, a political scientist at Diego Portales College in Santiago.

"He'll take a really robust stand in controlling the borders, the place he'll in all probability enhance the presence of the army. Coping with this shall be key to his success."

Through the election marketing campaign, Kast, the ultraconservative Catholic father to 9 youngsters averted all point out of the hardline ethical agenda with which he has been synonymous over a greater than 30-year political profession, first as a neighborhood councilor after which as a congressman.

Whilst Chilean society liberalized after the return to democracy in 1990 following Normal Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship, Kast has maintained his place on the far proper, voting in opposition to the restricted legalization of abortion – and even divorce laws – throughout his time in congress.

Kast begins a four-year time period he has labeled an "emergency" authorities, citing what he says is a rising safety and financial disaster — at the same time as Chile stays considered one of Latin America's most secure and most affluent nations.

All through his profession, Kast has incessantly courted controversy for his excessive views, together with his protection of the Pinochet dictatorship, which he campaigned to keep up in energy when the problem was put to a pivotal plebiscite in 1988.

In 2016, he left the right-wing Unión Demócrata Independiente occasion after 20 years and three phrases in congress, saying that it had strayed too removed from its founding ideas because the defender of the dictatorship's legacy.

He ran for the presidency the next yr as an unbiased, successful 8% of the vote, and in 2019 based the Republican occasion on the muse of the "protection of human life since conception," household values and the market financial system.

Throughout his 2021 presidential marketing campaign, the place he received within the first spherical however was defeated convincingly by leftist Boric within the runoff, he stated that if Normal Pinochet have been nonetheless alive, the dictator's vote would have been solid in his favor.

In his native Paine, a quiet agricultural city simply south of Santiago, some residents bear in mind the Kast household fondly as a pious clan who constructed a profitable meat and restaurant enterprise.

Kast's father, Michael Kast, was born in Germany and fought within the Wehrmacht. A member of the Nazi Occasion, he left post-war Europe for Argentina earlier than ultimately settling in Chile.

However others in Paine — the place 70 folks have been forcibly disappeared beneath the Pinochet dictatorship, greater than in some other municipality in Chile — are much less optimistic concerning the rise to energy of a supporter of the regime.

"Our work, our memorials, our historical past, it is all in danger," stated Gerson Ramírez Guajardo, whose father was kidnapped and disappeared by troopers quickly after the 1973 coup d'état.