Chileans go to the polls in an election marked by indecision

Some fifteen million Chileans, half of them undecided, are summoned this Sunday to choose between seven candidates for the successor of President Sebastián Piñera. The options range from the extreme left to the extreme right. These elections are considered the most uncertain in the country’s 31 years of democracy.

These elections, the fourth in Chile since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, will take place amid a slight rebound in virus infections. Chileans must also vote for 155 deputies, 27 of the 43 senators and regional councilors.

The country is going through a period of changes since the social outbreak that it experienced in October 2019, so whoever is elected president will be key for these changes to materialize or not.

Representatives of the two most extreme political blocs arrive as favorites. The deputy of the pact I Approve Dignity, a coalition that brings together the Broad Front and the Communist Party, Gabriel Boric, the youngest candidate in history at 35 years old, and the lawyer and far-right politician José Antonio Kast, 55, from the Republican Party.

However, the scenario does not have recent polls since the dissemination of polls is prohibited by law for more than two weeks. Other candidacies that may come as a surprise are that of the option of the ruling right-wing coalition, Sebastián Sichel, 44, and that of the only woman, senator and former minister of Michelle Bachelet, the Christian Democrat Yasna Provoste, 51.

For the international political analyst Juan Velasco, the panorama in the country has changed a lot and he says that Chileans went from having an apparently clear situation in which a second round was expected between Boric and Sichel, to an uncertain one, then in a few weeks Kast , akin to the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) and who shows sympathy with the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, and with Donald Trump, will be able to position himself.

The analyst and pollster Marta Lagos, executive director of Latinobarómetro, says that in order to understand the boom that the extreme right would be having in Chile, it must be understood that “there is a distortion produced by the mediocrity of politics” … and that “as well as the left exploded through the social outbreak of 2019, now comes the counter-reform ”.

Lagos states that even though the dictatorship came to an end, authoritarianism continued to have followers, 40% Pinochetists in the 1990s and now around 20%. On this figure, Velasco agrees and underlines that it is the figure that he voted for the rejection in the referendum to decide the wording of the new Magna Carta.

Velasco also considers that Kast’s popularity grew thanks to some failures of the official candidate during the campaign and even because of the presentations in the debates held, which he describes as opaque. Velasco also says that it was in those same debates that Kast’s figure gained considerable visibility. He attributes it to the support of the Independent Democratic Union (UDI), party linked to Pinochetism, and to which Kast belonged in its beginnings.

“In the last debate, Kast had to change his position on many things that are in his own government plan, so if he goes to a second round, especially with Boric, it will be much more difficult to reinforce the center position. that Sichel did have and that it was better evaluated in the last debate ”, says Velasco.

The analyst mentions that in this election there has been great interest among the Chilean people to follow the debates that were televised, something that has not happened in previous processes and that could be key to defining the winner or finalists for a ballot on December 19 , in the event that no candidate reaches 40% of the votes, and for which alliances and negotiations will be decisive.

The Ecuadorian analyst and political consultant Oswaldo Moreno comments that Chile comes from an erosion of the ruling party as a result of the 2019 protests and the two extreme candidacies that could face each other in a second round is something that is becoming frequent in the region.

“You can talk about a technical draw and a second round where anything can happen,” he adds and comments that whatever the result, Chile’s relationship with the region and specifically with Ecuador would continue to be good.

Meanwhile, in the case of the left, Velasco says that “Provoste could not define well what it represented and that it was in opposition to Boric”, which points to change and guarantee rights, a position very aligned with what the wording seeks of the new Constitution, which has continued to advance in parallel.

“Provoste has finally tried to claim that she is the Concertación”, the most important center-left coalition in Chile that governed most of the 31 years of democracy after the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), now disintegrated.

Velasco says that after Boric, Kast, Sichel and Provoste, the other three candidates have not generated much impact.

“Marco Enríquez-Ominami, from the Progressive Country movement (PRO), a professional poetic and full of charisma, was weakened by the accusations that he received resources from a Brazilian company, similar to Odebrecht,” says the analyst.

The other option on the right is Franco Parisi, from the People’s Party, and it is a case that Velasco finds curious, he says that the candidate ran his entire campaign online since it is not in Chile. He has an arrest warrant for a fraud trial and has another for alimony. “Parisi is an anomaly that had not been seen before in Chile, but even so in the polls it has 10%”.

In the country, as in the others in the region that have recently faced electoral processes, there is fear of what the extreme left may come to represent. Venezuelan and Peruvian citizens, the first and second foreign communities, consider Kast the least dangerous option for Chile. AFP.

This population group can go to vote if they reside in the country for more than five years. The Electoral Service (Servel) has summoned more than 400,000 people. (I)

The seven Chilean presidential candidates

• Gabriel Boric, 35, is the Broad Front candidate for the I Approve Dignity pact. He is the youngest person in the history of the country to compete for the Presidency. His political life began a decade ago. As a political leader, he led student protests for free education and defines himself as an ecologist, feminist and critic of the liberal model inherited from the military dictatorship (1973-1990).
• José Antonio Kast, 55, belongs to the Republican party for the Christian Social Front. He is a defender of radical policies against migration, a staunch critic of abortion and equal marriage, close to the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. He was a councilor from 1996 to 2000 and a deputy from 2002 to 2018. He first sought the Presidency in 2017.
• Sebastián Sichel, 44, without party affiliation, is the option of the Christian Democrats, he was the surprise in the primaries of the ruling center-right. He was Minister of Social Development of the current Government and President of the State Bank, a position he left to be a candidate. Ex-Catholic, he is in favor of equal marriage, adoption between homosexual couples and supports abortion only at the risk of life, fetal non-viability and rape.
• Yasna Provoste, 51, represents the old Concertación, reformulated as the New Social Pact. She was dismissed by Congress when she was Minister of Education and forced in 2008 to spend five years out of public activity. In 2013 she returned to politics and became a deputy and then a senator. In March 2021 he assumed the presidency of the Upper House. His style is open to dialogue and is committed to decentralization and feminism.
• Franco Parisi, 54, is the option of the People’s Party, of the center-right line. He is an economist and ran for the presidency for the second time, this time without living in Chile, he has lived in the US for more than a year. His entire campaign was telematic and he did not participate in the debate for testing positive for COVID-19. He has a current arraigo order for owing alimony to his children since 2016.
• Eduardo Artés, 70, is the candidate of the ultra-left Patriotic Union. Educator and ex-member of the Communist Proletarian Action Party. He was an opponent of Salvador Allende. He considers himself an admirer of the North Korean regime. In 2019, he expressed his support for Nicolás Maduro when he assumed power again.
• Marco Enríquez-Ominami, 48, from the Progressive Party, is a Chilean-French filmmaker, former MP. He is running for the fourth consecutive time for the Presidency. The 2013 candidacy carries an accusation from the Prosecutor’s Office for issuing false invoices for services not provided to a contractor for more than $ 400 million, a cause in which he is awaiting oral trial. (I)