José Antonio Kast, a former Chilean congressman, is the most influential and well-known of the country’s radical conservatives, largely thanks to his two recent runs at the presidency. In 2017, he finished fourth with less than 8 percent of votes, but in 2021 he made it all the way to a runoff, where he gathered 44 percent of votes and lost to current President Gabriel Boric.
Now, Mr. Kast hopes it will be third time lucky.
Fears over migration, public security, and shifting social values have boosted Chile’s far-right in recent years — and Mr. Kast is banging that drum with gusto.
Just like in 2021, Mr. Kast has linked security issues to migration — and his platform for the 2025 election will include even more radical proposals to curb the entry of illegal immigrants.
His strategy has helped move a needle. Think tank Center of Public Studies (CEP) recently found that nearly 70 percent of Chileans agree that immigrants are responsible for increasing crime rates. These figures come as homicides grew by 150 percent from 2012 to 2022, according to official police numbers.
Reports from Chile’s Prosecutor’s Office explain that domestic violence (41.3 percent) and organized crime (37 percent), i.e., not immigration, are the main issues behind these deaths. Far-right bigwigs such as Mr. Kast, however, continue to spread baseless claims tying the two issues together.
This month, after speaking at the Hungarian edition of the Conservative Action Political Conference (CPAC) — an event known for hosting names such as Donald Trump, Brazi’s Jair Bolsonaro, and Argentina’s Javier Milei — Mr. Kast used his social media to compare the Hungary-Serbia tall barbed-wire border wall to an unsupervised part of the 860 kilometer divide between Chile and Bolivia.
“Which one is more effective?” he...
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