Madrid, November 15 (European Press) –
On Sunday, Chileans head to vote in the first round of the presidential election with up to eight candidates – with ruling party Janet Jara and far-right Jose Antonio Caste as presumptive opponents in the second round – as well as a renewal of the House of Representatives and half of the Senate.
Sunday’s elections are also marked by an increase in the population, after Congress decided that going to the polls in 2022 is mandatory. If estimates indicate that between seven and eight million voters participated in the previous elections, the number has exceeded thirteen million since the establishment of the new rule, as the 2024 local elections showed.
According to electoral law, there were no polls in Chile for two weeks, but there were televised debates and various campaign events, which concluded on Thursday with huge events, such as those of Jara and Kast, who took the opportunity to defend their models and launch a casual attack on their expected great rival in this first round, where there are two other options: Johannes Kaiser and Evelyn Mathie.
The electoral ballot is full of candidates from the right – some traditionalists like Matthei’s candidate and others like the candidate represented by the anti-vaccine Kaiser, who openly praises the military dictatorship – and some independents and all of them include Jara, the former labor minister until April.
Candidates
Jara, the first member of the Communist Party to aspire to rule the country, headed the candidacy of the “Unity for Chile” party after a clear victory in the ruling party’s primaries, driven by her management in the government of Gabriel Buric, where she was instrumental in reducing the working day to 40 hours per week.
In that second round – scheduled for December 14 – Jara will face one of those three right-wing candidates mentioned above, against whom she will have nothing to do, according to opinion polls and the predictable call among those with the right to vote for who is the former minister’s rival.
Unlike Jara, the right-wing candidates did not make it through the primaries, so the first round looks like one of those elections. The best place for round two is Kast, an old acquaintance in this type of battle. The Republican Party candidate has now tried to reach La Moneda three times.
In the campaign, Kast chose to talk about the economy, combating illegal immigration, and insecurity so that it became the main focus, ignoring the points of the so-called culture war that diminished his past aspirations. The challenge faced by Keizer, who aspires to be Chilean Javier Miley.
Kaiser leads the National Libertarian Party, a breakaway from the Kast Party, and even berates it for its moderation. A self-identified reactionary, he is a gun enthusiast and represents a very neoliberal, economically and socially conservative far-right.
Matthi, a representative of classical conservatism who enjoys the support of the centre, was punished for his mistakes – he justified Augusto Pinochet’s coup – and for pressure from Kast and Kaiser, who forced him to defend, for example, strict anti-immigration policies so as not to lose right-wing votes.
Horizon to the right
Although Jara has a chance to win in the first round, on the contrary, he has a much less favorable scenario in December. Despite being one of the most prominent members of Burić’s government, in another irony, being part of it also weakened him due to the erosion of the government.
But this does not apply to the right, which has been able to take advantage, almost from the beginning, of the major challenges faced by Boric’s government: crime, despite being one of the safest countries in the region, and illegal immigration.
About 337,000 foreigners live irregularly in Chile, most of them from Venezuela. The right has not been shy when it comes to linking this type of migration with crime, which they propose to solve with an iron fist, a dynamic that is repeated throughout the region, hostage to historical and endemic inequality.
Kast proposed building Nayib Bukele-style high-security prisons in El Salvador, Mathey committed to strengthening police presence on the streets, and Kaiser, in addition to mass expulsions of foreigners, was in favor of replicating security policies like those of Donald Trump, such as transferring convicted criminals from other countries to prisons outside Chilean territory.
Jara also spoke of multi-million dollar investments to strengthen security and borders, although, like the current government, he is committed to foreigner integration programs and has insisted on targeting organized crime funds in the pursuit of money laundering.
The “obligated” five million
This is the first presidential election in which between five and six million Chileans, who do not normally vote, will have to do so under penalty of fines ranging from 30 to 100 euros, although there are exceptions, such as proof of illness or disability, or being outside the country.
Since the reform passed by Congress in 2022, there have been four votes and thirteen million have put their votes in the ballot box out of the 15.6 million who were automatically registered in the census.
The profile of this new voter is still unclear, although it is unpredictable because of his lack of interest in politics, he will drift towards the right, according to some analyzes which suggest that he was instrumental in the cancellation of Burić’s constitutional proposal and in the clear victory of the Kast Party in the elections to the Constitutional Council, the body that was responsible for discussing a new proposal for the Magna Carta.
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