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In Chile, the election for a new president will go into a second round on 19 December after none of the seven candidates managed to secure the necessary 50% needed to win outright. Far-right candidate José Antonio Kast will face left-wing former student leader Gabriel Boric in the run-off. The election is one of the most polarised in recent decades and comes after mass anti-government protests. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-59331695
What’s more, several of the nearest runner-up candidates are ideologically closer to Kast than Boric, potentially giving the 55-year-old conservative the upper hand in the scramble for endorsements.
A trained lawyer and onetime lower house lawmaker, Kast is running for the nation’s top job for the second time. He’s expressed admiration for the late dictator Augusto Pinochet – who executed thousands of his political critics, mostly leftists and socialists—and has been criticized for taking a hard line on immigration and being against same-sex marriage.
Chile, which has long been among the most prosperous and predictable democracies in Latin America, has been rocked by social and political volatility since violent street protests broke out in October 2019. The unrest led the outgoing government of President Sebastian Pinera to approve a referendum to rewrite the constitution which was passed by a wide margin. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-21/chile-careens-toward-polarized-kast-boric-presidential-runoff
Latin American regional experts have been watching Chile’s election more closely than any other contest in Latin America this year. Long seen as a model for liberal reformers across the region, Chile ranks seventeenth in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index and was traditionally seen as exceptionally stable. Yet the country made global headlines in 2019 when months of mass protests and political upheaval, caused by discontent about inequality and bad public services, led to the creation of a constituent assembly to replace the country’s dictatorship-era constitution.
The 2021 presidential election suggests that the days of Chile’s moderate and consensus-based style of politics are over. Instead, the country seems poised to experience an extremely polarized showdown during the December 19 runoff between two men whose respective visions for the future of the country are diametrically opposed—Kast, restoration and Boric, transformation. https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/11/22/more-polarized-than-ever-presidential-election-in-chile-marks-new-political-era-pub-85839
READ MORE: https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/chile-is-set-its-most-polarized-election-decades-2021-11-18/