José Antonio Kast, an ultra-conservative who promises to restore order to Chile while trying to leave the shadow of Pinochet behind

The candidate reformulated his most controversial proposals during the campaign for the second round with a view to attracting voters with a tendency of the center.

As an ultra-conservative and a fervent Catholic, this is how they describe the Chilean presidential candidate José Antonio Kast, who led the first round of the election last month with a two-point advantage, won 27.9% of the total votes, although at the moment the main polls place him as the possible loser of the second round this Sunday in which he will face the leftist Gabriel Boric, who obtained 25.8% of the electorate.

Kast, 55, father of nine children, seeks for the second time to reach the Palacio de la Moneda. In the 2017 elections, in which the current president Sebastián Piñera was elected, he obtained fourth place with 8% of the votes.

A strong hand against violence and crime, ditches to stop migration, recover the economic splendor of Chile, fierce opposition to gay marriage and abortion or extreme defense of the free market and tax minimalism were his main ideas when he ran, but During the entire campaign for the ballot, he opted to redesign his government program to attract Chilean voters with a more tendency from the center.

Second round in Chile: José Antonio Kast is presented as the presidential candidate of the order

Kast – a lawyer and candidate for the Republican Party, a movement he founded in 2019 – reformulated the original version of his plan, changing some of the most criticized proposals on reducing the State, eliminating the Ministry of Women, immigration, among others, privatizing Codelco (the largest copper producer in the world) and added points suggested by forces that provide support from the center-right and liberal right, collects Third.

The new program failed to mention proposals such as abortion that generated strong criticism when he defended the repeal of the Law approved in Chile in 2017 that allows the interruption of gestation in three causes: vital risk of the woman, fetal non-viability and pregnancy due to rape.

“Circumstances are changing throughout the campaign” or “we said that the program was not set in stone” have been two phrases with which Kast has justified the changes, considered a defender of the figure of the dictator Augusto Pinochet (1973- 1990), past that has been evident wants to leave behind.

Linked with Pinochet and the Nazis

His ties with the dictatorship have cost him more than a headachea, especially days before the first round, when in a meeting with foreign correspondents he wanted to differentiate the Pinochet regime from Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

He affirmed that the transition in Chile took place after “democratic elections”, in which “the opponents were not locked up”: “Tell me if dictatorships hand over power to democracy and if they make a transition to democracy and it is respected. That is what other countries do not do and in Chile it was done ”, he insisted then.

His complacency is not new. In fact, he supported the continuity of Pinochet in the 1988 plebiscite – one of his nine brothers was a minister of the dictatorship- and at the beginning of the campaign he used to repeat that General Pinochet would vote for him if he were alive, something that he has barely mentioned in the final stretch.

However, a few weeks ago the controversy surrounded him again when it came to light that his father, of German origin, belonged to the Nazi party.

Kast had already commented on occasion that his father was part of the Unified Armed Forces of Nazi Germany (Wehrmacht) during World War II after a “forced recruitment”, but he never admitted his affiliation: “I and the whole family hate the Nazis, “he clarified a few days ago.

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Political experience

Meanwhile, the candidate has tried to sell himself as someone distant from traditional politics, but is an old acquaintance in that field since He was a deputy for 16 years for the Independent Democratic Union (UDI), of which he was a militant for two decades.

Now with his young party, he has won the transversal support of the entire right, from his former UDI colleagues to some liberals.

He has also stated that former US President Donald Trump and the current Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, are his references, although analysts agree that he is less outlandish than them.

He also showed closeness to the Spanish far-right party VOX and a few days ago he met with the Venezuelan opposition Leopoldo López, he refers EFE.

Will fight the migration crisis

And while certain points of his program earned him social criticism and accusations of sexist, homophobic and xenophobic for several of the initial proposals that he already reformed, shis ideas to preserve order and security have made a good part of the country see him as the only one capable of restoring to Chile the “peace” it had before the wave of protests in 2019, the most serious since the end of the dictatorship, with some thirty deaths, thousands of wounded, looting and fires.

Kast calls the protesters who confront the security forces “violent” and assures that in La Araucanía, where there has been a territorial conflict between Mapuche indigenous and foresters for decades, there is “terrorism”.

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In his proposals, he maintains to solve the deep migratory crisis with the construction of a trench of hundreds of kilometers in the purest Trump style in the highland area, bordering Bolivia, where thousands of Venezuelans have been walking since the end of 2020, as well as creating a “ temporary military camp in the Colchane area ”, the epicenter of the migratory crisis in Chile.

It is also expected to contemplate demanding that Bolivia and Peru reinforce borders and take charge of the caravans of illegal migrants that come from their territories and end up in Chile due to “negligence and lack of control.”

Another of his star promises in terms of public safety it is the implementation of a new state of emergency where people can be arrested in their own homes or in places other than prisons.

“We were a model for the world and we have to be able to recover that, be a model for the world, and that is a challenge … I don’t want to be a president who raises his fist, I want to be a president who opens his hand and welcomes” Kast said in the last debate. (I)

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