Chilean right wing eyes return to power as crime, migration dominate election

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(Corrects to ‘Polls will open’ from ‘Polls opened’ in para 2, fixes date in dateline)

By Alexander Villegas and Fabian Cambero

SANTIAGO (Reuters) -Chileans are voting in a presidential election on Sunday that’s pitting the governing leftist coalition against an array of right-wing candidates and will also redefine the country’s legislature. 

Polls will open at 8 a.m. local time (1100 GMT) and are expected to close at 6 p.m. (2100 GMT), but will remain open if there are voting lines. 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% plus one vote needed to win the election outright, likely triggering a run-off between the top two candidates on December 14. 

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 Jose 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 current President Gabriel Boric, who isn’t allowed to run for reelection, to power. 

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% 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.

“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 Valparaiso, who added the vote would be very difficult to predict, adding that polls in Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador failed to predict recent results.

“(New voters) don’t think in terms of left, right or center, they think in terms of what changes are needed and what will benefit them,” he said.

Most of Congress is also up for grabs, with the entirety of the 155-member lower house and 23 of the country’s 50 Senate seats up for grabs. 

The governing leftist coalition currently has a minority in both chambers and right-wing majorities in both could set the stage for Congress and the presidency to be controlled by the right for the first time since the end of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship in 1990. 

(Reporting by Alexander Villegas and Fabian Cambero; Editing by Alistair Bell)