The World Today
MADRID, 23 (EUROPA PRESS)
The presidential race in Chile officially kicked off this week with eight candidates competing for the November elections, which will be marked by polarization. The latest polls point to the Republican Party leader, far-right leader José Antonio Kast, and the ruling coalition's communist candidate, Jeannete Jara, as the favorites.
Chile's Electoral Service (Servel) received on Monday the eight candidates who will compete to succeed President Gabriel Boric, who won the 2021 presidential elections with more than 55.8 percent of the vote, against Kast, who narrowly missed out on the presidency with 44.1 percent of the vote. He is running again in these elections promising to improve the security crisis caused by organized crime and drug trafficking.
According to a recent poll conducted by the Cadem polling company, Kast is leading the count with 28 percent of the vote, followed by former Labor Minister Jeannete Jara, who is two percentage points behind the far-right candidate. In third place is former Providencia mayor Evelyn Matthei, a candidate for the conservative Chile Vamos coalition, who has 16 percent of the vote.
In parallel with the presidential elections, Chileans will also go to the polls to renew the Chamber of Deputies and a large part of the Senate in equally fragmented parliamentary elections, with the vote split between Kast's coalition, Cambio por Chile, and the ruling Unidad por Chile party, led by Jara, leading to a parliamentary election with no clear majority.
Over the past three years, President Gabriel Boric, who cannot run again, has sought to consolidate his mandate through social measures, such as his popular reduction in the working day and the pension reform, which introduced employer contributions into a system dominated by private pension providers.
The Frente Amplio leader also scored points with the modification of the inheritance tax, the copper mining tax—which allows a third of the proceeds to be allocated to regional governments—as well as the enactment of the comprehensive law against gender violence and the law against violence against children.
However, despite his campaign promises, his administration has been hampered in part by his failure to enact a new Constitution to replace the one inherited from the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Another of his most notable debts to the Chilean electorate is his proposal to nationalize lithium.
In total, a report by the Ciudadanía Inteligente Foundation indicates that Boric has only fulfilled 38 percent of his campaign promises, with defense and democracy being the main areas where no progress has been made.
GOVERNABILITY IN CHECK
The electoral cycle, which officially began this week, predicts that both the left and far-right will rely on consensus to govern, although polls already place Kast—who was chosen as the candidate without going through primaries—in the second round of the presidential elections, giving him a slightly greater advantage than Jara in eventually passing laws in a polarized Congress.
Kast, who presented his candidacy under the slogan "The Force of Change" and is ideologically close to Argentine President Javier Milei and U.S. President Donald Trump, has promised to implement a series of measures to overcome stagnant economic growth, the rising cost of living, and rising unemployment, in addition to focusing on immigration and security issues.
In contrast, the left-wing bloc backed by Jara, who served as Undersecretary of Social Security during former President Michelle Bachelet's second term, will have the support of the Christian Democrats, which exposed internal rifts within the party and precipitated Alberto Undurraga's resignation for opposing the communist candidate.
Jara—who defeated Carolina Tohá, the center-left Democratic Socialist Party representative, in the ruling party's primaries—has tried to distance herself from being Boric's successor and has claimed that she wants to build a government focused on economic growth, with raising the minimum wage and increasing investment as her flagship measures.
Matthei will also make another run in the presidential race. She failed in her bid to reach La Moneda in the 2013 presidential elections as a candidate for the Alianza coalition, led by the Independent Democratic Union, against Bachelet, who managed to garner 62.17 percent of the vote in the second round.
Another familiar face is populist Franco Parisi, who ran for the 2021 presidential election as the candidate for the People's Party and is now ranked fourth in polls, behind only Matthei. With an apolitical and anti-partisan approach, he launched his election campaign from the United States, where he lived, and through social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube.
Also running in the elections is far-right National Libertarian Party (PNL) candidate Johannes Kaiser, who resigned from the Republican Party in November 2021 following a series of misogynistic and racist statements. The candidate, once an ally of Kast, has even supported a coup like the one that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in the country.
The least popular candidates, who received less than 2 percent of the vote, are independents Marco Enríquez-Ominami, founder of the now-defunct Progressive Party, Harold Mayne-Nicholls, former president of the National Professional Football Association, and Eduardo Artés, general secretary of the Chilean Communist Party (Proletarian Action), who is running for his third consecutive term.
