On a rainy Tuesday last week, Chile’s president-elect José Kast took to a stage in the European Parliament to pledge allegiance to Donald Trump’s White House.
“We’ve worked together for so many years and generated links on both sides of the pond,” the incoming far-right president told his audience, hundreds of sharply dressed politicians, special advisers, think tank staffers and political influencers. “We want to see that alliance between the USA and Europe.”
In one month, Kast will be in power, having sold a now-familiar cocktail of populist anger, anti-immigrant sentiment, and anti-gender messaging around abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. In Brussels, his speech was both celebrated and echoed. “Freedom lovers around the world must work more closely with the US,” said Brazil’s former minister of foreign affairs, Ernesto Araújo, when he was given the microphone. “This needs to be a transnational fight.”
