The country’s polarization is reflected in the candidates, former student leader Gabriel Boric and José Antonio Kast, close to Pinochet’s policies
The political center has ceased to exist in Chile. This Sunday, more than 15 million Chileans are called to vote for a new government in the second round of a momentous election, in which the two candidates present totally opposite proposals. The call to elect the candidate who will preside over the country in the Casa de la Moneda is toss-up: Gabriel Boric, a 35-year-old former student leader, from the Approve Dignity formation that has managed to bring together all the parties from the center to the left (Broad Front and Communist Party). Either he, or José Antonio Kast, 55 years old and candidate of the Christian Social Front, winner of the first round, who has all the alliances from the center to the extreme right and is a staunch defender of a neoliberal model not far from the one installed by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).
What is clear is that if Chileans vote for Kast they will have elected the most right-wing president since the dictator Pinochet. And if they elect Boric, they will have chosen the most leftist since Salvador Allende (1970-73).
Chile is experiencing an important social crisis, in which the good news is that the pandemic is being controlled, the writing of a new Constitution and the signs of recovery of the economy. In this environment, a very hectic electoral campaign has developed, with clashes between followers of both sides and harsh accusations between the candidates. “Kast’s program is really worrying”, declared Boric a few days ago and described his rival’s proposals as violent: “It is violence against women, against indigenous peoples, with diversities and against the human rights of all and of all ».
His past weighs heavily on Kast. Son of Germans, with a father who belonged to the Nazi Army and brother of a Pinochet minister. However, the reputation of having Donald Trump and Jair Bolsanaro as references, of having defended certain decisions of the Pinochet dictatorship, of having a far-right program in which he expresses his opposition to abortion, did not prevent Kast from winning in the first round , with a vote of 27.9% for the 25.8% obtained by Boric, and a participation of 47% of the electorate.
This first victory gave the right-wing candidate an advantage in the polls, but in the last week expert analysts have dared to think that the winner will be Boric by a very narrow margin. The history of Chilean democracy, however, has shown since 1999 that the winner of the first round ended up being the tenant of the Casa de la Moneda.
“The polls say that at the moment we are tied, but we are going to win by an important difference,” Kast said at the close of his campaign. “Chile is not and will never be a Marxist or communist country. With those speeches of peace and love they are not going to fool us. Communism is the same throughout Chile and throughout the world. The left only promotes poverty, that poverty that has dragged Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, where people flee from there because that drug dictatorship only brings poverty and misery, “added Kast.
Agitation
The campaign has been very tense, with harsh accusations between the two leaders and clashes by their voters
Nor has Boric been left behind in the forcefulness of his speech: «Our path is peace. To reunite with Chile we need social justice and not violence. And there is no clearer way for instability than to leave everything as it is, which is what, ultimately, José Antonio Kast proposes ».
The death of Lucia Hiriart
The two candidates have qualified some of the proposals that they brought in their programs for the elections on November 21, especially those referring to the economy. Kast, for example, promised a drastic cut in taxes, and for the second round today he has introduced the change that he will do so “gradually.”
Boric has promised 40 hours of weekly work, create 500,000 jobs for women, promote green development in the European style and also a substantial change in the private pension and health system so that there will never be discrimination between rich and poor again. Regarding the candidate for Approve Dignity, it can be said that his intentions reflect the feelings of progressives who are concerned about environmental degradation, social inequality, and respect for native peoples, at the same time that he postulates equal opportunities for all Chileans regardless of their socio-economic status, and a respect for feminist causes and the LGTBIQ community.
Technical tie
In the first round, the party on the right won by a slim margin.
Boric has had the support of former President Michele Bachelet, today the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, as well as former President Ricardo Lagos and former Uruguayan President José Mújica.
The aspirants
Gabriel boric
From the university protest to social peace in the streets
Gabriel Boric was born in Punta Arenas in 1986. His wealthy family was followers of the Christian Democrats. He is the right age to be able to run for president, an anecdotal fact but one that reveals his rapid development in politics. Until twelve years ago, he was a stranger on the public scene: in 2009 he emerged as a leader by organizing together with other colleagues – today all deputies – the occupation of a law school building where he was studying to demand the dismissal of a dean suspected of corruption . After forty days of confinement Boric was propelled towards politics. In 2012 he became president of the Student Federation and in 2014 he became a deputy in Parliament.
JA Kast
Anti-feminist and related to the neoliberalism of the dictatorship
A review of Chile’s past allows us to discover 32 years ago José Antonio Kast asking for the vote for Pinochet before the 1988 plebiscite, in which the Chileans rejected his continuity. The candidate, a lawyer by profession, remains convinced that “the work” of that regime – of which one of his six brothers was minister – benefited the country and promoted its economic development, although he says he rejects the violence of the dictatorship. Born in Santiago in 1966, at the age of thirty he made his debut as a councilor. In 2002 he was appointed deputy for the Independent Democratic Union. But in 2016 he abandoned these acronyms to “start a new cycle where political correctness is put aside.” And it seems to have succeeded.
The main doubt of this second round is towards where the 12.8% of votes of the electorate will lean, which in the first one supported the economist Franco Parisi, a candidate who was especially surprising because his entire campaign was carried out without stepping on Chile and through the networks social from his home in Alabama (United States).
Chile is a country that on Friday knew the death of María Lucía Hiriart, widow of the dictator, at the age of 98, and in which many citizens took to the streets to celebrate his death, but also in which the right-wing senator, Iván Moreira, He expressed his condolence because “the departure of Mrs. Lucia marks a milestone in the final closing of an era with more lights than shadows, a stage in history that should leave lessons for future generations.”
Described on several occasions for her love of luxury and a dominant personality, Lucía Hiriat acted as her husband’s personal advisor during the bloody Chilean dictatorship, which caused more than 30,000 victims of torture and imprisonment, 2,300 deaths and at least a thousand of disappeared whose whereabouts are still unknown today. After knowing his death, the Chilean night was filled with horns.
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