By Tomás Leighton
Chile, an important nation of Latin America is going for the Presidential polls on November 21 this year, the outcome of which will be very crucial for the political future of both this country and the region as a whole. The left movement in the other countries of the continent are eagerly looking for the results of this election as it will have impact on the coming polls in other countries.
So far, the leftist candidate Gabriel Boric from the Broad Front (Frente Amplio, FA) seems to have the biggest lead in the polls; however, the far-right José Antonio Kast is also rising fast, and as the centre-right begins to crumble, all signs point to a highly polarized contest. This, in a country that has grown accustomed to a revolving door between centre-right and centre-left governments.
Chileans will go to the polls to vote for a successor to right-wing president Sebastián Piñera at a time when his administration is at a historic nadir. His government received heavy international scrutiny during Chile’s 2019 uprising, when, on Piñera’s watch, police committed repeated human rights violations against protesters. At the same time, elections will take place less than a year after the election of members of the new Constitutional Convention, the body charged by popular vote with drafting the new constitution that would replace the so-called “Pinochet Constitution” of 1980.
Making matters more unpredictable, the campaign trail has seen the sudden collapse of Piñera’s successor candidate, Sebastián Sichel. The recent Pandora Papers scandal brought to light Piñera’s participation in the sale of the Dominga mining company — a sale carried out in a tax haven in the British Virgin Islands. That collateral damage and Sichel’s own underperformance on the campaign trail seem to have put the Piñera-loyal candidate out of contention.
In reaction to the decline of the ruling party’s standard-bearer, Sebastián Sichel, Chilean conservatives have launched a media blitz to promote the far-right candidate José Antonio Kast. Kast is a reactionary in the mold of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, and the fact that he is neck-and-neck with Boric should give us pause.
Who is Kast, and why has his support grown in a Chilean society that seemed to be turning left? Kast is a long-serving politician who has been in public office since 1996. Although he previously ran on the ticket of the Independent Democratic Union party (founded by Augusto Pinochet’s ideologue Jaime Guzmán), Kast ran as an independent in the 2017 elections.
Kast’s support is strong with conservative sectors who were scandalized by the social uprising of 2019. He blames both the violence of riots and a looming economic crisis on foreign interference — some imaginary group with ties to Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro that is sowing chaos in the lives of ordinary Chileans and can only be stopped by his heavy-handed leadership.
The ultraconservative candidate has, in fact, run a campaign full of lies: Kast professes to be a patriot but had no reservations about investing $21 million in a Panamanian tax haven. He promises to stop migration by building a ditch along the entire national border, seemingly forgetting that his father migrated to Chile after serving in the Nazi army during World War II.
Even with the startling growth of the far right, the Left still holds a respectable, if narrowing, lead in the polls. Mounting social unrest has only intensified during the pandemic, and a large part of the population, galvanized by the Constitutional Convention, has actually been politicized in recent years and is showing unprecedented interest in the political process. Gabriel Boric, who helped make the Constitutional Convention possible, is the unquestioned opposition candidate against Piñera.
Before becoming a congressman for Chile’s southern Magallanes region, Boric was a prominent leader during the country’s 2011 student protests, and he soon became the president of the FECh (Federación de Estudiantes de la Universidad de Chile, the University of Chile Student Federation), the oldest student federation of Latin America.
(IPA)
