With third time lucky for Chile’s José Antonio Kast last Sunday, South America’s political map vaguely evokes the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) over five centuries ago with a diagonal line crisscrossing the subcontinent – the difference being that north and east of that line corresponds to the left rather than Portugal while west and south belong to the right, not Spain.
Having six of the 10 republics in his bag (although less population and fewer square kilometres) might seem to see everything going the way of The Donald but a couple of caveats here. Firstly, while Bolivia, Honduras and now Chile have all swung right in recent voting, Trump’s pet candidate had problems riding the crest of the wave – his man in Bolivia was ex-president Jorge Quiroga of Alianza Libre as the most rightist candidate but Christian Democrat Rodrigo Paz Pereira is now president; in Chile both Trump and Javier Milei favoured Johannes Kaiser of the Partido Nacional Libertario but that imperial surname garnered less than 14 percent of the vote and it was Kast who advanced to a run-off which was his to lose; only in Honduras (still in turmoil a fortnight after the election) does Trump´s man Nasry Asfura seem to have prevailed but his Liberal rival Salvador Nasralla was in the lead the day after the election and then again a couple of days later.
Secondly and more generally, in five of the six South American republics where the right now rules the roost (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay and Peru), only in Paraguay is there continuity – in the other countries the preceding president was left of centre, thus raising the question of whether their defeat was an ideological lurch to the right or discontent with a sitting government.
Concentrating the focus on Chile, the number-crunching characterising this column in much of this year hardly comes into play here with minimal figures to relay. The Republican Kast won last Sunday’s run-off with a record total of 7,228,897 votes or 58.3 percent as against 41.7 percent for Communist Jeannette Jara – he swept all 16 regions and 313 of Chile’s 346 communes (the 33 eluding the Republican landslide all lying in the mining north).
The outcome could not be much clearer and the only real mystery for this analyst at least is how Jara managed to top 40 percent after her meagre first-round haul of under 27 percent from her extreme corner of the political spectrum. Her votes transferred from centrist outsider Franco Parisi (who polled just under 20 percent in the first round and urged a blank vote, a recommendation heeded only by a third or less of his voters with over half going for Kast) would take her over 30 percent but where did the other 10 percent come from? This columnist can only conclude that many Chileans would rather vote for even a Communist than anything remotely evoking the 1973-1990 Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. Would a more moderate presidential hopeful like the ex-minister and former Santiago mayor Carolina Tohá have done better? The question is now purely hypothetical.
How rightist is Kast within the regional trend? That question can probably only be answered well into his presidential term because the paradox of his success is that his landslide came from toning down his spiel from his previous two presidential campaigns, leaving “cultural battles” aside, but the sheer magnitude of his margin of 16-plus percentage points might incline him to feel that he has a mandate for a more ambitious presidency. With nine siblings and nine children, he is a more genuine exponent of family values than most and this authenticity could lead him into dogmatism over pragmatism.
Some opponents tar Kast with a Nazi brush (Colombian President Gustavo Petro called him “a son of Hitler”) due to his Teutonic origins and father but this is a cheap shot. His Bavarian father Michael Kast enlisted in both the Wehrmacht and the Nazi party but neither military service nor party membership were exactly voluntary under the Third Reich, especially by 1942 – more likely he was a typical product of German Catholicism during that era, neither actively participating nor offering much serious resistance but washing their hands in the manner of Pontius Pilate.
The Benjamin of his family, Kast was only seven at the time of the 1973 coup, spending his formative years under the Pinochet dictatorship – during that period he was very much under the shadow of his eldest brother Miguel (Michael Junior at home just as today’s president-elect was “Anton”), destined to be the family’s star turn until last Sunday as a Chicago Boy who in many ways pioneered Chile’s pro-market economic transformation even ahead of Hernán Büchi as the dictatorship’s Planning minister and Central Bank governor until he fell victim to bone cancer in 1983 at the age of 34.
Graduating in law from the Catholic University in the last year of Pinochet (1990), Kast did not enter politics until well into democracy (1996). For two decades he was a militant of the UDI (Unión Demócrata Independiente), then the larger and more conservative of Chile’s two right-wing parties, serving four terms as deputy between 2002 and 2018 when he cultivated an ultra-conservative and far right image. Since leaving the UDI he has basically been a presidential candidate, running as an independent in 2017 and for the Republican Party (which he founded in 2019) in 2021.
José Antonio’s Chile is not his brother Miguel’s, on track for averaging six percent annual growth until a decade ago but since the 2019 social upheavals and the pandemic struggling to reach two percent. Nor is it the Argentina inherited by Javier Milei with annual inflation under four percent, a fiscal deficit of a couple of percent and an outward-looking economy. Kast has promised “shock” policies offering both growth and fiscal discipline (not always comfortable partners) but few details beyond budget cuts of US$6 billion despite a 60-page election manifesto – it all remains to be seen when he takes office in March.
Yet this was not an “it’s the economy, stupid” election, as readily emerges when Kast stated his order of priorities: “I’m going to dedícate myself to fighting crime and illegal immigration and to the economy,” an order shared by over 60 percent of Chilean voters, according to opinion polls. But what he is going to do there will also have to wait until March.
(Today’s column ends a series beginning on April 12 while ‘Beyond the Headlines’ will return early next year. This does not mean that this columnist will not be writing next weekend but it will not form part of any series).
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