With a high rate of undecided and without polls for 15 days due to the electoral ban, experts warn that the elections are “very open.”
Chile concludes this Saturday the preparations for the most uncertain and polarized general elections since the return to democracy three decades ago, a day that the presidential candidates decided to spend surrounded by family and friends.
The leftist deputy Gabriel Boric, one of the great favorites, traveled to his native Punta Arenas, in the extreme south of the continent, where he will vote early on Sunday before moving back to Santiago to follow the results.
“We just need a pencil and our convictions to fill the ballot boxes in the hope of bringing all of Chile together,” the 35-year-old former student leader, who represents the coalition made up of the leftist Frente Amplio and the Communist Party, said on Twitter.
The other great favorite to go to the December 19 ballot, the far-right José Antonio Kast, of the Republican Party, will spend the day in Santiago with his wife, with whom he has nine children, and until noon on Saturday he was silent in social networks.
Chile comes to the elections in the process of economic recovery and awaiting a new Constitution
With the brilliant rise of Kast, who began as an almost testimonial aspirant and now has the possibility of reaching La Moneda (presidential headquarters), Chile joins the rise of the toughest conservatism that has emerged in recent years in the United States, Brazil, Spain, Hungary or France.
Cards with different options
With a high rate of undecided and without polls for 15 days due to the electoral ban, experts warn that the elections are very open and that there are two other candidates who could also have opportunities: the Christian Democrat Yasna Provoste and the ruling party Sebastián Sichel.
Provoste, the card of the traditional center-left parties that ruled Chile for three decades, traveled to its native Vallenar, in the northern Atacama desert: “My main adversary is the extremes. They generate violence and instability, ”he assured in an interview with a local media outlet.
Five keys to the elections in Chile that marked a before and after in the country
For his part, former Minister Sichel played a soccer match in the capital early in the morning, after which he posted on Twitter: “In soccer we can show strength and teamwork. Tomorrow we will play the game where the future is defined ”.
Other candidates with less adherence are the progressive Marco Enríquez-Ominami, the ultra-left Eduardo Artés and Franco Parisi, a controversial economist who resides in the United States and has not yet traveled to Chile.
More than 15 million Chileans are called to the polls to elect not only the successor of the current president, the conservative Sebastián Piñera, but also 155 deputies and 27 of the 43 senators.
The composition of the new Parliament will be crucial for the governance of the country and analysts predict that no force will have a majority and that large pacts will be needed to legislate.
Expectation for rain of young people at the polls
The new president will have the titanic task of leading a post-pandemic recovery marked by historic inflation, implementing the norms of the new Constitution -which has been drafted since last July- and closing the wounds left by the 2019 protests, the most serious since the end of the military dictatorship (1973-1990), with thirty thousand wounded.
The other great unknown will be participation, since Chile is one of the countries in the region with the highest abstention. Since voting was no longer mandatory in 2012, only the 2020 plebiscite to change the Constitution has exceeded 50% of the participation (50.9%), a mark that could be beaten in these elections, according to experts.
Unlike the last electoral appointments, the pandemic is controlled in Chile, where there are hardly any restrictions on mobility and more than 90% of the target population has the complete vaccination scheme.
The National Youth Institute (Injuv) revealed this Saturday that 77% of young people would go to vote on Sunday, a historic mark considering the disaffection towards politics of this age group. (I)
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