José Antonio Kast

Overview

On the morning of Wednesday 11 March 2026, hours before he was due to be sworn in as Chile’s 35th president, José Antonio Kast did something almost no English-language profile of him mentions: he resigned from the political party he had founded himself. Kast filed his resignation from the Republican Party online that morning — it was announced by the electoral authority Servel — fulfilling a campaign promise he had put bluntly years earlier: “No voy a seguir siendo militante del partido… hoy voy a representar a Chile entero” (“I will not continue to be a party militant… today I will represent all of Chile”) (La Tercera). The party’s leader, Arturo Squella, had confirmed in February that the break had to happen before 11 March, calling it a symbolic milestone for a president who founded his party on 10 June 2019 (La Tercera).

The resignation was the final punctuation on an unlikely political arc. Born in Santiago in 1966, Kast is the youngest of ten children of German immigrants whose family built a successful sausage business; media investigations revealed his father had been a member of the Nazi Party who fought in World War II — Kast has said it was a forced conscription and that his father did not believe in Nazi ideology (Al Jazeera, Malay Mail). His older brother Miguel became a central bank president and government minister under Augusto Pinochet, whose dictatorship Kast openly admires — making him, as one academic told Al Jazeera, the first Chilean president since the dictatorship to openly support Pinochet (Al Jazeera). Trained as a lawyer at the city’s Catholic university, Kast became a councilman for Buin in 1996 and spent more than a decade in Congress for the centre-right Independent Democratic Union (UDI) before breaking with it in 2016 (Al Jazeera).

Three attempts at the presidency

Kast’s first presidential run, in 2017 as an independent, won him only about eight percent of the vote (Al Jazeera). By then he had founded Acción Republicana (2018) and then the harder-line Republican Party in June 2019, appealing to voters unsettled by rising insecurity and economic stagnation (Al Jazeera, FactsLedger). In 2021 he won the first round but lost the runoff to Gabriel Boric with 44 percent (Al Jazeera). The third attempt, in December 2025, was different: Kast defeated Communist candidate Jeannette Jara with about 58 percent of the vote, declaring in his victory speech that “Chile needs order – order in the streets, in the state, in the priorities that have been lost” (Al Jazeera).

What he stands for

Kast is a 60-year-old lawyer and father of nine, married to fellow lawyer María Pia Adriasola (Malay Mail). A staunch Catholic, he opposes abortion even in cases of rape, emergency contraception, divorce, same-sex marriage and euthanasia — and once forbade his wife from using birth control pills (Malay Mail). His congressional record was famously thin: his legislative achievements were limited to laws on the construction of statues, the sale of reading glasses without a prescription and the regulation of lotteries (Malay Mail).

Security and migration are the platform’s core. Kast has pointed to El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele and his “mano dura” gang crackdown as a model, arguing Chile needs “more Bukele”; he has pledged to send the military into high-crime areas, build more prisons, and deport hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants — mostly Venezuelans — telling them on the eve of the vote to “pack your things and leave” (Al Jazeera, Malay Mail). He has proposed an ICE-inspired migration police force and border infrastructure along Chile’s northern frontier, and even threatened a state of siege in the Araucanía region with warrantless searches, arrests and suspended civil rights to expel armed Indigenous groups (Al Jazeera). He claims immigration is a plot by the “radical left,” and has said he favoured granting freedom to people convicted of human-rights violations under Pinochet (Malay Mail, Al Jazeera).

Those who know him describe a study in contrasts. His biographer Amanda Marton calls him “sober, pragmatic, calm, compared to other far-right leaders”; political scientist Robert Funk of the University of Chile says he is far more conservative and lacks charisma beside figures like Bolsonaro, Milei or Trump — while supporters say the calm demeanour is part of his appeal (Malay Mail). Former colleagues describe an authoritarian streak — “You’re with him or against him,” recalled journalist Lily Zuniga — and during the campaign Kast appeared behind bulletproof glass and admitted to carrying a revolver (Malay Mail).

The inauguration

At 12:28 on 11 March 2026, in the Salón de Honor of the National Congress in Valparaíso, Kast received the presidential sash and symbols; at 12:35 he swore to “cumplir y hacer cumplir las leyes de la República” (La Prensa Austral). The band was placed on him by Senate president Paulina Núñez of Renovación Nacional, while the outgoing Gabriel Boric handed over the piocha de O’Higgins, the star-shaped jewel that seals the Chilean presidency (Xinhua). Guests included Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, Argentine president Javier Milei, Spain’s King Felipe VI, and the presidents of Uruguay, Bolivia and Ecuador (La Prensa Austral, Xinhua).

The day carried the weight of his mandate: with about 58 percent of the runoff vote he became the most-voted president-elect in Chilean history, in the country’s first election with compulsory voting, automatic registration and fines for non-participation (La Prensa Austral, Xinhua). He will be the first president to reside in La Moneda Palace since Carlos Ibáñez del Campo in 1958, with Pía Adriasola as First Lady (La Prensa Austral). The morning began with a grim omen — a police officer shot in Puerto Varas was left brain dead — and before taking office Kast dispatched his security minister, Trinidad Steinert, to the Los Lagos region (La Prensa Austral). His government promises a “gobierno de emergencia” with a first-100-days-style plan called “Desafío 90” led by economist Bernardo Fontaine, against a 3.6-percent-of-GDP structural fiscal deficit (La Prensa Austral). His cabinet included Claudio Alvarado at Interior, Jorge Quiroz at Finance and Francisco Pérez Mackenna at Foreign Affairs — alongside two former Pinochet defence lawyers, Fernando Rabat and Fernando Barros, as justice and defence ministers (Xinhua).

The movement around him

Kast’s presidency rests on a movement of young loyalists, and Ignacio Dülger is one of its clearest examples: he built his entire career inside Kast’s orbit, from youth-affairs coordinator for Acción Republicana in April 2018 to territorial chief for Kast’s 2021 presidential campaign, then into La Moneda’s “Second Floor” as a presidential adviser early in the Kast presidency, and from September 2026 as executive director of Acción Republicana itself (FactsLedger). The Clinic has described Dülger as one of the militants closest to the president — a sign of how tightly Kast’s governing circle is drawn from the movement he built (FactsLedger).

What this profile does not claim

This profile gives no exact birthdate for Kast and does not state the precise years of his congressional service — the sources read in full confirm only that he was born in 1966 and served “more than ten years” for the UDI. It reports no absolute runoff vote total, since the two inauguration-day sources that agree he is Chile’s most-voted president-elect give slightly different figures. It makes no claim about which of his 2026 security, migration or fiscal plans have been enacted into law; the presidency is described here only through inauguration-day reporting and the movement around him. It does not claim any link between Kast and Argentine consultant Fernando Cerimedo beyond what the Dülger profile documents: Kast denied Cerimedo worked for him.