Chileans elect president between extremes: Kast or Boric?

Driven by fears to extremes, Chileans went to the polls on Sunday to elect their new president from among the leftist Gabriel Boric and the far right Jose Antonio Kast, in the second round of the closest and most polarized election in many years. Whichever winner is, it will put a new twist on a country that for the past three decades has been ruled by leaders closer to the political center.

Kast, a lawmaker with a track record of defending Chile’s past military dictatorship, finished ahead in the first round of voting last month, but failed to obtain the required majority of votes. That set up a runoff against Boric, a former leader of the millennial student protests who finished second with a difference of two percentage points.

“I lived what the left was in this country and I never want to experience it again,” Beatriz Lagos, a 61-year-old public employee who says she supported Kast, told The Associated Press.

Constanza Camus, a 28-year-old telecommunications engineer, said, for her part, that “there is no one to vote for; one means backsliding and the other stagnation ”. He added that the next period “is going to be complex for both, since they are extreme.”

The political analyst Marcelo Mella said that the campaign towards the second round, “more than founded on ideas, generates fear in the people. People are going to vote to prevent the other candidate from leaving ”.

The greatest uncertainty in the day has to do with how many of the 15 million voters finally managed to vote and how many points will separate the winner from his adversary. The precincts closed at 6:00 p.m. local time, although they must allow all those who line the street to enter so they can vote.

After casting his vote in his native Punta Arenas, in the extreme south, Boric said that “at night we will respect the result, whatever it may be,” while Kast said that if the results delivered by the Electoral Service (SERVEL) are very narrow – less than 50,000 votes – “this could be defined in the electoral court.” He added that if the difference is greater in favor of Boric, he will go to greet him.

In Chile, the electoral law establishes three counts of votes in any election, which are generally very similar between the first one that the Servel delivers on the same election night. The next morning the neighborhood Electoral Colleges do another recount based on the minutes made by each of the more than 46,000 polling stations. Finally, the Election Qualifying Tribunal (Tricel) carries out a final scrutiny, resolves complaints and officially proclaims the winner. The result of the Servel and the Tricel, known two weeks after the first round, varied only by 1,272 votes, among 7.2 million votes cast.

Kast, 55, a devout Catholic and father of nine children, was running for the presidency for the second time, the first time in 2017 and he won 8% of the vote. On this occasion he rose in the polls due to mistakes made by the center-right candidate, pushed by a discourse focused on order, peace and family.

He was elected deputy four consecutive times for a conservative party, which he resigned to create his own party, the Republican. He has a harsh speech, a history of criticism towards Chile’s LGBTQ community, opposes abortion and equal marriage. He also accused outgoing President Sebastián Piñera of betraying the economic legacy of Augusto Pinochet, who controlled the country with force of arms and repression for almost 17 years.

Boric, 35, would become Chile’s youngest modern president. He was one of several activists elected to Congress in 2014 after leading protests for higher quality education. A strong detractor of Pinochet’s neoliberal economic model, he proposes gradually increasing taxes on the “super rich” to expand social services, combat inequality and promote environmental protection.

In the last weeks, both candidates moderated their programs and speeches to win over the central electorate that did not vote for the majority in November.

Piñera, who also voted early, wished the winner “wisdom, prudence and success, because he will need it.”

In Chile, it is prohibited to broadcast electoral polls from 15 days before the elections, although studies known online from traditional pollsters project that Boric would win by about five points.

The next government will face a complex economic outlook. After growing between 11.5% and 12% this year, it would fall to 2% in 2022, with inflation close to 7%, more than double the 3% goal that Chile has had for years.