Jose Antonio Kast is Chile's new president after sweeping the elections

Right-wing candidate Jose Antonio Kast swept Sunday's ballot and will be Chile's next president. The 59-year-old conservative lawyer, won with 58% against communist Jeannette Jara, who represented a left-wing coalition and got 42%, after 86% of the votes were counted.

He will assume power on March 11 for a four-year term.

The devout Catholic and father of nine promises to deport nearly 340,000 undocumented migrants, mostly Venezuelans, and to attack crime head-on.

"Andwe were very tired at the national level of the economic wear and tear (...) We missed the right," said Maribel Saavedra, a 42-year-old Kast voter who was opening a champagne in front of the president-elect's campaign headquarters.

This social worker said she hoped Kast would "reinforce the country with work" and "regularize the immigration issue".

Kast's rival, a 51-year-old lawyer who was labor minister in Gabriel Boric's government and reduced the working day to 40 hours, admitted defeat quickly and promised a "demanding" opposition.

Argentine President Javier Milei was the first in Latin America to congratulate his "friend" Kast. "One more step by our region in defense of life, liberty and private property," he said on the social network X.

The U.S. secretary of state, Marco Rubio, also congratulated him and said he looks forward to cooperating with Kast to "strengthen public safety, end illegal migration and revitalize our trade relationship."

Kast believes Chile is "falling apart." This was his third attempt at the presidency, now as a candidate of the Republican Party he founded five years ago, because he found the traditional right wing too soft.

In his public acts, behind bulletproof glass in one of the safest countries in the region, this former congressmanpresented Chile almost as a failed state dominated by drug trafficking, which is moving away from the "economic miracle" that made it one of the most successful nations in Latin America.

63% of Chileans say crime and violence are their biggest concern, followed by low economic growth, according to an October Ipsos poll.

However, the perception of fear in Chile is much higher than actual crime figures indicate.

Homicides have doubled in the last decade, although they have been falling for two years. However, there is a rise in crimes such as kidnapping and extortion, following the irruption of Venezuelan, Colombian and Peruvian gangs, such as the Tren de Aragua.

A vote for fear of communism

In the first electoral round, a month ago, both Jara and Kast obtained a quarter of the votes, with a slight advantage for the leftist. But right-wing votes totaled 70%, and propelled Kast to the La Moneda presidential palace.

Since 2010 the right and the left have alternated in power in Chile in every presidential election. The vote was mandatory in this presidential election for the first time in more than a decade.

If Kast wins "you shouldn't think he has a super-strong mandate to do what he wants," because a lot of people vote for him out of fear of Jara, estimated Robert Funk, a political science professor at the University of Chile.

With information from AFP.