Leftist Gabriel Boric leads the polls.
The final stretch to elect the next president of Chile began.
This Friday, with less than a month to go before the elections – considered the most momentous in the country’s recent history – on November 21, the traditional television propaganda started, which could be decisive in the midst of a scenario with uncertainty.
The seven candidates presented their advertisements with topics such as social rights, security or post-pandemic recovery as central axes in their career to replace the current president, the conservative Sebastián Piñera, in the elections on November 21.
Former left-wing student leader Gabriel Boric, one of the favorites, called for the decentralization of the country and defended the environment in his television slot, recorded from the Atacama desert, an area of the north that has been accused of neglect for years.
“It is urgent that decentralization and citizen participation be the coming north of Chile,” he said in the campaign, in which faces known as actors or some of the drafters of the new Constitution participated.
“Freedom” was the central concept of the audiovisual campaign of the far-right José Antonio Kast, who in recent weeks has climbed on the podium to become another of the most supported, according to some polls.
The strip, which lasts 20 minutes divided equally among all the candidates, will be broadcast daily at noon on the free reception television channels, and in the afternoon the announcements of the candidates for deputies and senators will be broadcast, a vote that It will also be held on November 21.
The next president of Chile will have the task of channeling a country that experienced a strong social crisis in 2019 that is still in force and of implementing, if approved, the norms of the new Constitution, whose substantive drafting began last 18 October.
Despite the political relevance of the elections, less than half of Chileans are clear about their preference according to the Center for Public Studies (CEP), in a country with voluntary voting and a shot abstention that in previous elections exceeded 80%.
According to the polls, increasingly questioned, Kast and Boric lead the preferences and the only woman, the Christian Democrat Yasna Provoste, who dedicated the total time of her strip to those who died from the COVID-19 pandemic, is consolidated in the third place.
The excesses during the protests or the recent migration crisis are, according to analysts, the reasons why the ultra-conservative Kast has been favored, who until now had a minority support and who has disseminated a strong discourse in favor of public order and to harden the borders.
Other faces of choice
Far away in the polls is Sebastián Sichel, Piñera’s former minister and ruling party candidate, who began as Boric’s main rival but who in recent weeks has suffered several setbacks during the debates that place him in fourth place.
“We must defend the freedom to start and have your own business, the freedom to live in an orderly and peaceful society,” he said during his television advertisement.
Other candidates with less support also presented their creative campaigns: Eduardo Artés, a representative of a more radical left, the progressive Marco Enríquez-Ominami and Franco Parisi, a controversial liberal economist who lives in the United States.
If a candidate is not specified in the first round, the ballot would be on December 19.
In addition to facing the current social crisis, the next Government, which will begin in March 2022, will also have to address a serious institutional crisis and will face the economic challenge of curbing the current inflationary crisis, triggered according to experts by social aid and pension withdrawals to help families during the pandemic. (I)
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