Updated March 11, 2026 at 6:15 PM EDT
SANTIAGO, Chile — José Antonio Kast has been inaugurated as Chile's new president today at a ceremony in the coastal city of Valparaíso. The far-right politician built his career railing against liberal values from the fringes of Chilean politics.
Kast won a resounding victory over his leftist rival in a runoff in December, taking over 58% of the vote with his hardline approach to public security and illegal immigration.
His ascent to the presidency marks an abrupt departure from the progressive agenda of leftist Gabriel Boric, whose four-year term ended today.
"There are certain issues which Kast will emphasize first, like immigration," said Claudio Fuentes, a political scientist at Diego Portales University in Santiago.
"He will take a very strong stand in controlling the borders, where he will probably increase the presence of the military. Dealing with this will be key to his success."
During the election campaign, Kast, the ultraconservative Catholic father to nine children avoided all mention of the hardline moral agenda with which he has been synonymous over a more than 30-year political career, first as a local councilor and then as a congressman.
Even as Chilean society liberalized after the return to democracy in 1990 following General Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship, Kast has maintained his position on the far right, voting against the limited legalization of abortion – and even divorce legislation – during his time in congress.
Kast begins a four-year term he has labeled an "emergency" government, citing what he says is a growing security and economic crisis — even as Chile remains one of Latin America's safest and most prosperous nations.
Throughout his career, Kast has frequently courted controversy for his extreme views, including his defense of the Pinochet dictatorship, which he campaigned to maintain in power when the issue was put to a pivotal plebiscite in 1988.
In 2016, he left the right-wing Unión Demócrata Independiente party after 20 years and three terms in congress, saying that it had strayed too far from its founding principles as the defender of the dictatorship's legacy.
He ran for the presidency the following year as an independent, winning 8% of the vote, and in 2019 founded the Republican party on the foundation of the "defense of human life since conception," family values and the market economy.
During his 2021 presidential campaign, where he won in the first round but was defeated convincingly by leftist Boric in the runoff, he said that if General Pinochet were still alive, the dictator's vote would have been cast in his favor.
In his native Paine, a quiet agricultural town just south of Santiago, some residents remember the Kast family fondly as a pious clan who built a successful meat and restaurant business.
Kast's father, Michael Kast, was born in Germany and fought in the Wehrmacht. A member of the Nazi Party, he left post-war Europe for Argentina before eventually settling in Chile.
But others in Paine — where 70 people were forcibly disappeared under the Pinochet dictatorship, more than in any other municipality in Chile — are less optimistic about the rise to power of a supporter of the regime.
"Our work, our memorials, our history, it's all at risk," said Gerson Ramírez Guajardo, whose father was kidnapped and disappeared by soldiers soon after the 1973 coup d'état.
"I think we are all concerned about what is to come."
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