SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — Chileans voted for a new president and parliament on Sunday in a contest expected to favor the hard right as candidates play on popular fears over organized crime and immigration.
It’s the first of what’s likely to be two rounds of presidential elections in the South American country, as polls show none of the candidates clearing the 50% threshold needed to avoid a runoff scheduled for Dec. 14.
This also marks Chile's first presidential election since voting became mandatory and the registration of voters automatic, adding an element of unpredictability to the race and millions more apathetic voters — given past elections marked by abysmal turnout rates.
Over 15.7 million people are now obliged to vote, and those who fail to do so face fines up to $100.
Chile will also renew the entire lower house of Congress and part of the Senate.
On the surface, the election offers Chileans a dramatic choice between two extremes: Jeannette Jara, 51, a card-carrying communist and former labor minister in the left-wing government, and, among other right-wing contenders, José Antonio Kast, 59, an ultraconservative lawyer and Catholic father of nine who opposes abortion and vows to shrink the state.
“The vote largely defines what our lives will be like for the next four years,” Jara said as she cast her ballot in a northern suburb of Santiago, the capital.
Two extremes pursue the center
But the campaign has steered the starkly opposed front-runners toward the shared theme of public insecurity, as anxiety about a rise in gang-driven crime and a recent surge of immigration from crisis-stricken Venezuela seizes voters' focus.
“They’re vying for the center,” said Rodolfo Disi, a political scientist at Chile’s Adolfo Ibáñez University, citing Jara's promotion of fiscal restraint and Kast's decision to drop the traditional-values pitch that defined his past two failed presidential bids.
All front-runners have taken an iron-fisted approach to immigration. Chile’s foreign population has doubled since 2017, with 1.6 million immigrants recorded last year in the nation of 18 million. An estimated 330,000 are undocumented.
“On the right and the left, they think kicking out foreigners will solve everything,” said Oscar Meina, 45, a Venezuelan among the more than 800,000 immigrants with residency of five years or more eligible to vote. “If it weren't for my democratic duty, I wouldn't vote for anyone.”
A fractured right wing
Polling behind Jara and Kast in the eight-candidate field are Johannes Kaiser, 49, a radical libertarian congressman and YouTuber, and Evelyn Matthei, 72, a veteran center-right politician.
Matthei appeals to voters wary of both Kast’s culture war battles and the hard-line Chilean communist party's support for socialist governments in Venezuela and Cuba.
“On paper Jara supports dictatorships in our region,” Camila Roure, 29, said outside a polling station where she voted for Matthei. “But as a woman, Kast scares me.”
Kaiser, on the other hand, has recently courted Chile's radical voters disillusioned with Kast’s effort to moderate his image.
“He's a straight-shooter,” said Almando Marco, an accountant voting in an upscale Santiago neighborhood. "He doesn’t twist things around."
With the right-wing vote divided and President Gabriel Boric’s coalition united behind its former minister, most experts see the charismatic Jara prevailing in Sunday’s first round. Boric is constitutionally barred from seeking a consecutive term.
But an initial win for Jara may spell her defeat in a runoff against a right-wing rival who promises a harsher security crackdown.
“We want change, and that change today is about security," José Hernández, the 60-year-old owner of a seed company, said after casting his ballot for Kast. “This stage of my life should be about enjoyment. Now I'm home by 9 p.m. because of fear.”
Outdoing each other on security
All candidates say it’s a top priority to control illegal immigration and fight foreign gangs, like Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, whose recent push into Chile has fueled new crimes and shattered the country’s self-perception as far safer and more stable than the rest of the region.
“The mafias, the narcos, the kidnappings, this was never part of our culture, these were never Chilean crimes,” said Kenneth Bunker, a Chilean political analyst.
Kast wants to build a massive wall along Chile’s northern border and deport tens of thousands of people who entered illegally.
“What I believe most citizens expect is unity to confront the problems that afflict us today, which are problems of security,” he said while voting on Sunday.
Even Jara has sought to burnish her tough-on-crime credentials with promises to build new prisons and expel foreigners convicted of drug trafficking.
Matthei wants to deploy drones and more armed forces to the border.
Kaiser wants to hold undocumented migrants in detention camps and bar their children from attending school. Supporters thronged the congressman as he voted on Sunday, shouting “Long live Chile!”
High unemployment, sluggish growth
As labor minister, Jara pioneered some of the government's landmark welfare measures, raising the minimum wage, boosting pensions and shortening the workweek to 40 from 45 hours.
To address Chile’s cost-of-living crisis — which in 2019 helped fuel the country’s most significant social upheaval since the 1990 fall of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship — she proposes a “living” monthly income of around $800. But she also stresses the need to keep a lid on public debt.
“She’s a communist in name only,” said Macarena Breke, 27, an English teacher voting in downtown Santiago Sunday. “To me, Jara isn’t an ideological symbol; she’s someone who gets things done.”
Taking a page from the playbook of President Javier Milei in neighboring Argentina, Kast vows to shrink the public payroll and slash corporate taxes in a bid to revive a stagnant economy that has slowed the pace of job creation as immigrants flood the labor market. Unemployment hovers at a high 8.6%.
He says he'll cut more than $6 billion in spending over 18 months — something that Matthei, an economist by training, calls “totally and absolutely impossible.” Kaiser promises to go further by slashing up to $15 billion in spending.
A nation transformed
This law and order election stands in stark contrast to Chile in 2021, when Boric, a tattooed ex-student protest leader, handily beat Kast in a runoff as voters outraged over widening inequality backed the then-35-year-old's promises of sweeping social change.
But post-pandemic economic constraints and legislative opposition restricted Boric’s ambitions while carjackings, kidnappings and sex trafficking dominated TV news, stirring panic even as homicide rates have fallen in the last two years.
“It’s convenient for certain politicians to sell the idea that the country is on fire, that everything is falling apart,” said Loreta Sleir, a 27-year-old walking her dog to the polling station, where she said she would vote for Jara.