With his usual calm, he spoke of order, progress, democracy and recovery and winked at his hardest followers, claiming to be the option of “freedom” against the “communism” of his leftist rival. Gabriel Boric. But he also quickly launched messages to voters in the center, who will be the key players in Sunday’s ballot.
Right there he announced that he was ceasing to be the leader of his party to try to become president of Chile.
“Today we have played a majority of Chileans who want a calm and safe country,” he said on the night of November 21, reiterating the concepts that led him to gain strength at a time when Chile is going through a period of uncertainty after the social outbreak of 2019 and the nearly two-year pandemic.
“This December we are not only going to elect a president, we are going to choose between freedom and communism, between democracy and communism,” he said.
His opponents accuse him of “fascist” and “extreme” and they constantly allude to the German origin of his family, but he says he has never endorsed the violence. He is an unambiguous defender of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet And before the 2017 presidential elections in which he competed, he said that, had he been alive, the general would have voted for him.
His brother Michael was a minister and president of the Central Bank during the dictatorship.
His father came to Chile after fighting with the German army in World War II and recently an investigation revealed an identification card showing that a person with the name and date of birth of Kast’s father joined the Nazi party in 1942, when he was 18 years old.
The German Federal Archive confirmed the authenticity of the card, although it said it could not confirm the personal identity of the Chilean presidential candidate’s father.
The candidate has said several times that his father was drafted very young to go to war.
“At 18 he was already at the front. When he came back he said ‘I never want to know about a war again,'” Kast recounted in a recent television interview.
A defender of the private sector and a staunch opponent of the center-left governments that governed after the military regime (1973-90), he has nevertheless been in charge of highlighting the progress of the South American country in these three decades in an attempt to attract the voters of the sector. who do not end up opting for Boric.
55-year-old lawyer, married, father of nine and Catholic, Kast also worries about marking distance from the unpopular right-wing government of Sebastián Piñera, to which he questions his handling of public order and the approach to illegal immigration, which has unleashed problems in the north of the country.
He was a militant and several times a deputy for the right-wing Independent Democratic Union (UDI) party – today in the government coalition – which he resigned in 2016 to follow his own path.
On Twitter, where he constantly interacts with his half a million followers, he deploys part of his strategy: “They tell us intolerant and extreme, because we speak the truth and say things head-on. Unlike the left, we have never endorsed violence.” he wrote in October.
The candidate attacks the demonstrations that, with much less force, continue to take place every week in the center of Santiago and that usually end in acts of violence. Likewise, it questions the work of the convention that drafts a new Constitution for Chile, although it has ensured that in a possible government it will respect this process and its deadlines.
Too promises a strong hand to confront the Mapuche indigenous conflict that shakes the south of the country, assuring that it is “terrorism” and opposes abortion, which in Chile is only allowed on certain grounds. Regarding the ballot, however, he has moderated his opinions on issues of value such as homosexual marriage – approved a few days ago in Chile – or women’s rights.
He has also reformulated his economic proposals and recently said in another interview that his candidacy has summoned representatives of various political sectors.
In the 2017 elections, he came fourth in the first round of the presidential elections. Kast has said that his project is long-term, but the result of the first round accelerated his plans.
Source From: Ambito
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