Chileans are voting in an election this Sunday that pits the ruling leftist coalition against a series of right-wing candidates in the race for president and that will also redefine the country’s legislature.
They are in local time and must close at 6pm (same time as Brasília), but will remain open if there are queues of voters. Initial results are expected quickly, with the full investigation completed within a few hours.
There are eight candidates in the race for President and none of them are expected to obtain the 50% plus one vote needed to win the election in the first round, which would lead to a second round between the first two candidates on December 14.
Chilean law prohibits polls 15 days before the elections, but the latest data showed the candidate of the ruling coalition, the Communist Party, in the lead, with the far-right candidate José Antonio Kast, of the Republican Party, in second place.
Experienced center-right politician Evelyn Matthei, a former mayor and former senator, led the first polls, but has fallen in recent months and has been competing for third place with the libertarian Johannes Kaiser, of the National Libertarian Party.
Crime and immigration 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 to power. He cannot run for re-election.
Another change compared to the previous election is mandatory voting for the 15.7 million registered voters. The previous one recorded an abstention rate of 53% in the first round and the large number of apathetic or undecided residents able to vote adds an unpredictable factor to the dispute.
“It’s an unprecedented scenario that we haven’t experienced and that is happening in a presidential election,” said Guillermo Holzmann, a political analyst at Valparaiso University, who added that the vote would be very difficult to predict, adding that polls in Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador had failed to predict the 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 all 155 members of the Chamber of Deputies and 23 of the country’s 50 Senate seats up for grabs.
The leftist coalition that governs the country currently has a minority in both chambers and it is possible that, with this Sunday’s election, Congress and the Presidency will both be controlled by the right for the first time since the end of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in 1990.
