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December 18, 2021A vote that will mark Chile's future. In a climate of great uncertainty, 15 million voters will be called to the polls tomorrow to choose President Sebastián Piñera's successor for the next four years between two relatively new faces in politics: the ultra-conservative José Antonio Kast and the young leader of the radical left Gabriel Boric. A head to head that will also be crucial for the fate of the new Constitution, which the assembly elected after the massive protests of 2019 is rewriting to erase the legacy of the late dictator Augusto Pinochet.
A victory by Kast, an avowed admirer of Pinochet, could call everything into question, causing an institutional clash. Surprisingly leading in the first round with almost 28% of the votes on Boric, which stopped at 26%, Kast moderated his nostalgic speech by the former dictator in the second phase of the election campaign, hoping to reach the moderate sectors that did not vote last November 21, and made it known that he would not attend the funeral of the widow of the former dictator, Lucia Hiriart, who passed away on Thursday at the age of 99. To try to reach the palace of the Moneda and become the youngest president in the history of Chile, the 35-year-old Boric instead beat the regions of the north and south of the country, where he had received less support.
At the end of the election campaign, supporters of the 55-year-old lawyer Kast, also an admirer of Trump and Bolsonaro, gathered in the Parque Araucano in the Las Condes district, to hear him criticize Boric and stress that "the left only promotes poverty, that poverty that it has dragged Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba to incredible situations, where people flee, because those narco-dictatorships bring only poverty and misery ".
Boric met with leftist militants in Santiago's Parque Almagro, delivering a speech focusing on the union of Chile and the constituent process, often referring to his rival, but never explicitly naming him. "We are a generation that learns from who came first - he proclaimed - and we unite to defeat the dictatorship. We unite to democratize Chile, we unite to have a new Constitution and now we unite to defeat the heir of the (outgoing center-right) and pinochetismo ".
The challenge is above all between two antithetical visions for the future of Chile. Kast, from a German family who emigrated to Chile, is against marriage for same-sex couples and abortion and defends the neoliberal economic system, with the aim to cut taxes and social spending. Boric, on the other hand, as a former leader of the student movement fighting for free education, wants to raise taxes. The result is very uncertain. The unofficial polls released in the last few hours (the official ones are prohibited by the electoral law) indicate that Piñera's succession will end with a head to head that could create tensions between the militants of the two coalitions. For the Atlas Intel company, Kast would have 48.5% of the preferences against Boric's 48.4%.Polls throughout the country will remain open from 8 (12 Italian) to 18, or until the last person in line has placed his ballot in the ballot box.