Chileans are voting in a presidential election on Sunday that is pitting the governing leftist coalition against an array of right-wing candidates and will also redefine the country’s legislature. Polls opened at 8am and are expected to close at 6pm, but will remain open if there are voting queues. Initial results are expected quickly with a full count within hours. There are eight candidates in the race and none are expected to get the 50 per cent plus one vote needed to win the election outright, likely triggering a run-off between the top two candidates on December 14.
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Chilean law bans polls 15 days before elections but the last numbers showed Jeannette Jara, the governing coalition candidate from the Communist Party, in the lead with far-right José Antonio Kast, from the Republican Party, in second.
Experienced moderate-right politician Evelyn Matthei, a former mayor and senator, led early polls but dipped in recent months and has been trading third place with libertarian firebrand Johannes Kaiser from the National Libertarian Party.
Crime and immigration have dominated the electoral agenda, a far cry from the wave of left-wing optimism and hopes of drafting a new constitution that brought to power current President Gabriel Boric, who isn’t allowed to run for re-election.
Another shift from the previous election is a mandatory vote for the 15.7 million registered voters. The previous election saw an abstention rate of 53 per cent in the first round vote and the large amount of apathetic or undecided residents set to cast ballots adds a wild card to the race.
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“It’s an unprecedented scenario we haven’t lived through and it’s playing out in a presidential election,” said Guillermo Holzmann, a political analyst from the University of Valparaíso, who added the vote would be very difficult to predict, adding that polls in Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador failed to predict recent results.