From Santiago
To the lawyer José Antonio Kast, current candidate of the Republican Party – and who is part of the Frente Social Cristiano coalition located at the extreme right of the Chilean political map – openly defender of Pinochet’s economic legacy and currently a surprising leader in the CADEM poll, with a 24% intention to vote, it deeply annoys you that your middle name is omitted.
It happened in the middle of the television debate a couple of weeks ago when Gabriel Boric, of the left-wing conglomerate Approve Dignity, made up of the Broad Front and the PC, who, according to the same poll, supported him with 19%, called him “José”. The candidate, a descendant of a soldier from Hitler’s Germany who escaped to Chile With a false passport (“but he was not a Nazi,” as he has justified countless times) and whose father had close ties to the dictatorship, he breaks down.
It is that in a country like Chile where clear features, non-Spanish surnames and middle names are marks of class, dare to play with them, even coming from a “pair” like the young candidate – of Croatian roots whose children thrived in Magellan – it was a daring.
That has been one of the two times that Kast has been upset in this campaign that will have its first round on Sunday, November 21. The other was when Boric himself showed him documents with his alleged investments in Panama, which contradicted all his patriotic speech and surveillance of those who impose irregularly, photocopied of Trump and his personal friend, Bolsonaro.
It is that Kast who has served as a deputy from 2002 to 2018, always for the Independent Democratic Union, a right-wing party with Pinochet roots, tries to cultivate a style of absolute calm, with certain ironic touches and sometimes personal attacks on his opponents, without ever losing composure. Something that has made it possible to “normalize” his defense of the dictatorship – he speaks of a “military regime” – or the idea of establishing “ditches” to prevent the passage of immigrants through illegal passages. Something that despairs his opponents who are in front of a wall that not only transmits atrocities, but is also impossible to dialogue.
It is interesting that even obtaining low levels of voting in his first presidential adventure in 2018 (7.93%), he has become a favorite of the press and now of the most conservative sectors of the country that have gone from supporting Sebastián Sichel —the candidate of the ruling party that has been in a tailspin for months – and to assure, especially on social networks, that they support Kast. To such an extent is his security that he did not even appear in the debate organized by the University of Chile last Monday where subjects such as science and culture would be discussed. He is simply not interested in appearing in spaces like this.
Leader in polls no one believes
In Chile, no one really believes in presidential polls, except those who are winning them and the mass media – controlled mostly by the right – who need quantitative information. For example, CADEM, which not only erred in pointing out the two losers as favorites of the primaries – Daniel Jadue (PC) on the left and Joaquín Lavín (UDI) on the right – but also due to revelations about the methodological irregularities or right the falsification of data shared with other respondents. Specialists such as Marta Lagos, director of Mori-Gerc, an opinion research agency, summarize the situation as follows: “Polls in Chile are done to say what the elite wants”. And before an unprecedented scenario in the history of the country with a pandemic that is not yet controlled, a president investigated for his businesses on the edge of the legal and a social outbreak, which on October 18 marked two years and which became a constituent process to replace the Magna Carta of 1980, the great inheritance of the Pinochet dictatorship, what the elite wants is order. And that order is embodied by Kast better than anyone.
A Pinochetist program
For reasons yet to be clarified, Kast’s show went online and was suddenly taken down over the weekend. Perhaps the questions on social networks influenced his proposals that strongly recall the dictatorship, although normalized by the hegemony of the Chilean mass media where the adjective “fascist” will rarely be heard or read. The objective is that among the highlights of its program is the establishment of a “renewed state of emergency” with broad presidential powers to raid homes and intercept communications, the closure of the National Institute of Human Rights and an “international coordination against leftist radicals.” , a kind of update of the Condor Plan. He also proposes repealing the abortion law, eliminating taxes, and minimizing the state.
#Dare yourself
Kast is nice, apparently. This is recognized by the president of the Medical College, Izkia Siches, who despite raising her voice against President Piñera’s strategies in the pandemic and his high valuation among Chilean progressivism, was harshly criticized for meeting with him and ensuring that “there are several elements of his program that we have rescued that we believe that they go in the common sense ”. He is also up to date on social networks, copying the communication strategies of Trump and Bolsonaro —which their advisers seem to handle very well— dances on Tik Tok, interpellations of other candidates on Twitter, the intense use of “bots” that are dedicated to post phrases of support for his candidacy such as #Atrevete and his followers who, within minutes of finishing the debates, upload (manipulated) excerpts to YouTube where the winner always seems to be Kast. In the realm of post-truth, characters like him are kings.
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