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Chileans began voting for a new president and parliament on Sunday, in a contest expected to favour the hard right as candidates play on popular fears over organised crime and immigration.
It is the first of an expected two rounds of presidential elections, as polls show none of the candidates clearing the 50% threshold needed to avoid a runoff scheduled for 14 December.
On the surface, Sunday’s election offers Chileans a dramatic choice between two extremes: Jeannette Jara, 51, a card-carrying communist and former labour minister in the leftwing government, and, among other rightwing contenders, José Antonio Kast, 59, an ultraconservative lawyer and former lawmaker who opposes abortion and vows to shrink the state.
But with voters anxious about a rise in gang-driven crime that they blame on a recent surge of illegal immigration from crisis-stricken Venezuela, the campaign has steered the starkly opposed frontrunners toward the shared theme of public insecurity.
Polls opened at 8am and close at 6pm, with results expected throughout the night.
In a feat of political gymnastics, the communist candidate has promoted fiscal restraint while the Catholic father of nine has avoided talk of traditional family values.
Both say a top priority is to fight foreign gangs, such as Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, whose recent push into Chile has fuelled kidnappings, extortion and sex trafficking and shattered the country’s self-perception as far safer and more stable than the rest of the region.
“They’re talking about things that all voters care about, they’re vying for the center,” said Rodolfo Disi, a political scientist at Adolfo Ibáñez University in Santiago.
Polling behind Jara and Kast in the eight-candidate field are Johannes Kaiser, 49, a radical libertarian congressman and YouTuber, and Evelyn Matthei, 72, a veteran centre-right politician.
With the rightwing vote divided and President Gabriel Boric’s centre-left coalition united behind its former minister, most experts see the charismatic Jara prevailing in Sunday’s first round. Boric is constitutionally barred from seeking a consecutive term.
But an initial win for Jara may yet end in defeat in a runoff against a rightwing rival who promises a harsher security crackdown. “If [Jara] moves toward being tougher on crime, the right can always be tougher,” said Disi. “It’s a losing game.”
This is the first time in Chile’s history that all eligible citizens will be obliged to vote for the next president.
The country recently reintroduced mandatory voting after ending the practice in 2012. Voter registration is now automatic, so the millions of people who never registered, even when voting was compulsory, will be casting their first ballots in a presidential race. Those who fail to do so face fines of up to $100.
Analysts are divided over the potential effects.
“It’s a huge question,” said Robert Funk, an associate professor of political science at the University of Chile. “We have 4 million new voters. Who are they? Are they young people who like Jara? Are they people from marginal neighbourhoods attracted to Kast’s hardline stance on crime?”
Chile will also renew the entire lower house of congress and part of the senate on Sunday.
The country has 15.7 million eligible voters, of whom more than 800,000 are immigrants with residency of five years or more, who are exempt from mandatory voting. Polls show that foreigners overwhelmingly favour the right – especially Venezuelans who fled their repressive socialist government.
All frontrunners have taken an iron-fisted approach to illegal immigration. Chile’s foreign population has doubled since 2017, with 1.6 million immigrants recorded last year in the nation of 18 million. An estimated 330,000 are undocumented
Kast wants to build a massive wall along Chile’s northern border and deport tens of thousands of people who entered illegally. Kaiser wants to hold undocumented people in detention camps and bar their children from attending school. Matthei wants to deploy drones and more armed forces to the border
Jara, too, has sought to burnish her tough-on-crime credentials with promises to build new prisons and expel foreigners convicted of drug trafficking.
