Republican candidate José Antonio Kast had a phone call with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on Wednesday. This is the third conversation with an international leader since the ultra-conservative won the second presidential round on Sunday: on Tuesday he spoke with the Argentine Javier Milei and the Paraguayan Santiago Peña. International contacts give depth to his presidential candidacy at the start of the campaign for the December 14 runoff. The candidates of the right – traditional and extreme – totaled 50% of the votes in last Sunday’s elections, while the candidate of the left, representing nine parties, Jeannette Jara, obtained 26.8%, so the path for the far right seems clear to reach La Moneda on March 11.
“I just spoke with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, with whom we agree on the enormous opportunities that Chile and Italy have to project their excellent bilateral relations into the future,” Kast wrote on his networks, accompanied by a photograph of him speaking on the phone from his command in Santiago. The message is very similar to those published on Tuesday, when he reported conversations with Peña and Milei, although they spoke with the far-right libertarian about the opportunities of the region “and the relationship between Chile and Argentina towards a future with more freedom, security and economic progress.”
A few days after Donald Trump assumed the presidency of the United States for the second time, last January, Kast declared: “Our ideas have already won in the United States, in Italy, in Argentina (…) and we will win in Chile too.” In his third attempt to lead Chile, the Republican presents himself with the same beliefs as the global far right, but with a more moderate speech than in his previous candidacies, focusing mainly on security, the economy and immigration control. He talks about an emergency government focused on these issues.
His campaign manager in this second phase, Martín Arrau, said this on television on Monday Tolerance 0 that there are “coincidences of conservative ideas” with Meloni, and gave national pride as an example. He noted that they both share “bonds of friendship” and commonalities. In mid-September Kast met the Italian Prime Minister in Rome to address, among other issues, the fight against irregular immigration. Meloni, for her part, did not meet President Boric when the Chilean visited the Italian capital last October, despite it being a purpose of the trip.
When asked about the similarities that were highlighted The New York Times between Kast and Trump, the Republican campaign manager ruled them out. “No. They also called him Milei and compared him to Bukele. Every country, for starters, has its own idiosyncrasies, its own logic, and there are also different styles. There are some differences in realities, in everything. Today Chile is going through a brutal economic crisis; we are not the United States. Evidently, José Antonio’s style is very different,” he noted.
In one of the closing moments of his election campaign for the first round, Kast announced that members of his party will return to El Salvador, Italy, “to see the prisons and how they lock up gangsters”, Hungary and the Dominican Republic, “to see how they closed the borders”. “We have already seen it, but many of the teams that are carrying out this proposal today bring the best ideas and we apply them in Chile, just like they did. And this will start in December,” the candidate said a few days ago.
Since he was defeated in the 2021 presidential election against leftist leader Gabriel Boric, Kast has attended summits of far-right world leaders, such as the Conservative Action Political Conference (CPAC), or the Vox convention in Madrid, where he met Spaniard Santiago Abascal, Milei, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele or Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
