José Antonio Kast Rist is a lawyer, Chilean politician, and the elected president of Chile after prevailing in the presidential runoff held on Sunday, December 14, 2025. Leader of the Republican Party and three-time presidential candidate, Kast finally reached La Moneda with a proposal mainly marked by issues of security and economy, but without straying from his profile characterized by the defense of life and family.
Descendant of German immigrants and raised in the bosom of a deeply Catholic family, Kast has made his faith and moral convictions one of the most visible and consistent pillars of his public trajectory. In an interview given two years ago to ACdP, he summarized his hierarchy of priorities as follows:
“I entered politics as a Catholic; first I am Catholic, then I am a politician; first I am a father of a family, then I am a politician”.
He has been married since 1991, is the father of nine children, and belongs to the Schoenstatt movement. He declares himself a practicing Catholic and has consistently upheld pro-life and pro-family positions, even when they have come at a high political cost.
Education and Political Beginnings
Born in Santiago in 1966, José Antonio Kast is the youngest of ten siblings in a family of German origin marked by a strong experience of faith; one of his older brothers even embraced the priesthood. He studied at the German School of Santiago and later Law at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.
During his university stage, he joined the Gremial Movement, of Catholic and conservative inspiration, where he met Jaime Guzmán, founder of the Independent Democratic Union (UDI) and a key figure in Christian political thought in Chile. His relationship with Guzmán decisively influenced his vision of politics as a service guided by objective moral principles, especially the defense of life and family.
His political career included positions such as councilor and deputy. Already in Congress, Kast distinguished himself by prioritizing debates on fundamental moral and cultural issues. He was one of the firmest opponents of the divorce law in 2004 and warned at that time that its approval would open a permanent struggle in the field of values.
Break with the UDI and Foundation of the Republican Party
In 2016, after two decades of membership, Kast left the UDI, alleging that the party had strayed from its founding principles and had yielded to the “politically correct.” Seeking greater coherence between discourse and action, he first founded Republican Action and, in 2019, the Republican Party.
From that platform, he promoted an explicitly conservative agenda, which he himself has synthesized in the triad “God, homeland, and family”, defending life from conception to natural death, the family founded on marriage between man and woman, and religious freedom.
Marriage and Family
Beyond his public career, Kast has consistently emphasized the centrality of family life as the foundation of his personal and political vocation. His marriage to María Pía Adriasola, with whom he has more than three decades of married life and is the father of nine children, has been presented by him not only as a biographical fact, but as a vital experience that has shaped his convictions about commitment, responsibility, and service. That dimension was especially reflected on Sunday night, when, in his first speech as president-elect, he dedicated his first words to thanking his family for the sustained support over the years and publicly entrusted his mandate to God, asking for “wisdom, temperance, and strength to rise to the challenge”