Chile’s Presidential race kicks off with security and stability dominating campaigns

Audio By Carbonatix

Enlarge

By Alexander Villegas

SANTIAGO (Reuters) -Chile’s presidential election kicked into high gear on Wednesday, as leading campaigns officially launched ahead of a November 16 contest which may signal a shift to the right for the mining powerhouse.

The election’s top contenders are a left-wing coalition candidate from the Communist Party, Jeannette Jara, and conservative candidates including the Republican Party’s Jose Antonio Kast, the far-right firebrand who lost the last run-off against current President Gabriel Boric in 2021 but is viewed as strongly positioned this time.

Eight candidates are in the race, including Evelyn Matthei, an experienced conservative politician from the Independent Democratic Union Party, who served as a legislator and mayor of a wealthy municipality of Santiago.

Matthei led polls early in the year but has since dipped and struggled to regain momentum. Matthei is currently polling third at 18% in pollster Cadem’s latest numbers released Sunday. 

Kast and Jara have been trading the top spot in recent weeks and they also exchanged the most barbs during the first televised debate featuring all eight candidates last Wednesday. Cadem showed no monumental post-debate shift with Jara at 26% (-2%) and Kast at 25% (-1%).

VERY DIFFERENT POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT

A run-off between Jara and Kast would be Kast’s second of the decade but the political environment is vastly different this time around.

Boric, who defeated Kast in the 2021 presidential runoff and is not allowed to run for consecutive reelection, rode a wave of left-wing optimism to the presidency that has largely dissipated.

Boric’s election was the culmination of widespread protests against inequality in 2019 and the election of a largely independent and left-wing body in 2021 that was tasked with drafting a new constitution.

But voters overwhelmingly rejected the progressive constitution while rising crime, immigration and economic unease forced the administration to shift its focus.

Despite those efforts, security remains a sore point with many voters. Although Chile is still one of the safest countries in Latin America, a rise in violence, much of it stemming from organized crime, has rattled the nation and hampered economic growth.

“Crime has become a salient issue in Chile, the data support that, but I think more importantly, it’s the perception of insecurity and people’s fear,” said Michael Shifter, a senior fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue and professor of Latin American studies at Georgetown.

“I think that is a sharp contrast from 2021 to 2025. I think that has become a growing concern.”

Kast has proposed closing borders, creating maximum security prisons to isolate organized crime leaders and deploying the military to high-crime neighborhoods.

Jara has advocated increasing funding for police, social programs and biometric screening at the border.

If no candidate receives more than 50% of the votes on November 16, there will be a run-off on December 14.

Although Kast’s Republican Party in 2023 repelled voters with its handling of a second constitutional rewrite that was subsequently rejected, the left may be even more toxic at this point.

“I think he’s more ideological and more to the right than most Chileans I think are comfortable with,” Shifter said. “But if the choice is between him and Jara, from the Communist Party, I think he would have the edge in that contest.”

The election could be another reversal for the “pink tide” which put leftists in control of several Latin American nations a few years ago, following similar rightward shifts in Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador.

Colombia and Brazil are both facing presidential elections next year where incumbent leftists are on the ballot and facing challenges from the right. Shifter says both races present unique factors, like Colombia’s fractured right and the “Trump factor” in Brazil, where Lula’s opposition to the U.S. president has boosted his popularity.

(Reporting by Alexander Villegas; Editing by Christian Plumb and Ed Osmond)