Jose Antonio Kast
José Antonio Kast is a Chilean politician of the hard right who reached the presidential run-off in 2021 and again in 2025. Born in Santiago in 1966, he is the youngest of ten children of German immigrants; his father had been a member of the Nazi party and a Wehrmacht lieutenant who came to Chile after the war, a fact Kast has acknowledged and declined to disown. He trained as a lawyer at the Catholic University, is a member of the conservative Catholic movement Schoenstatt, and has nine children. He served four terms as a deputy for the Independent Democratic Union from 2002, left the party in 2016, and founded the Republican Party in 2019. His positions are consistently to the right of Chile's traditional conservatives: defence of the Pinochet government's economic legacy and, for much of his career, of the man himself; opposition to abortion in all circumstances, to same-sex marriage and to the gender identity law; a hard line on migration from Venezuela, Haiti and Colombia; and a security policy centred on the conflict in the Araucanía. He took 44 per cent in the 2021 run-off against Gabriel Boric. His party then won a landslide in the 2023 constitutional council election and produced a text so conservative that voters rejected it by 55 per cent, having rejected a left-wing draft the year before. He led the 2025 first round's second place and won the December run-off against the communist candidate Jeannette Jara, taking office in March 2026. He inherits a country whose two attempts to replace the Pinochet-era constitution both failed, leaving it in force. His mandate is chiefly on crime and migration rather than on the social agenda, which polling suggests the electorate does not share.
- Lived: 1966 CE – ?
- Nationality: Chilean
- Roles: President of Chile (2026-present)
