Chile votes in a presidential poll pitting a communist against the far right

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. It’s also Chile’s first presidential election since voting became mandatory and the registration of voters automatic, with over 15.7 million people obliged to vote.

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.

But with voters anxious about a rise in gang-driven crime that they blame on a recent surge of illegal immigration from crisis-stricken Venezuela, the campaign has steered the starkly opposed front-runners toward the shared theme of public insecurity.

“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.”

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 Communist Party’s support for authoritarian governments in Venezuela and Cuba.

“I consider myself center-left, but this candidate is, like, very very left,” Camila Roure, 29, said of Jara outside a polling station where she voted for Matthei in Chile’s capital of Santiago. “But as a woman, Kast scares me.”

Kaiser, on the other hand, courts more radical right-wing voters disillusioned with Kast’s new moderate image.

“I always liked the way Kaiser talked in his YouTube videos. He’s a straight-shooter. He doesn’t twist things around,” said Almando Marco, an accountant voting in an upscale Santiago neighborhood.

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,” said José Hernández, 60, the owner of a seed company after casting his ballot for Kast. “This stage of my life should be about enjoyment. But now I’m home by 9 p.m. because of fear.”

All the 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. “People feel displaced. Unemployment is up. They have something to blame it on.”

Kast wants to build a massive wall along Chile’s northern border and deport tens of thousands of people who entered illegally.

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.

“He’s the only one that can make Chile a first-world country again,” said Alatina Velázquez, 20, a student at a recent Kaiser rally where fans wore red “Make Chile Great Again” caps.

On the economy, Jara talks of boosting investment in infrastructure and keeping a lid on public debt. As labor minister, she was behind some of government’s major welfare measures, raising the minimum wage and shortening the workweek to 40 from 45 hours.

“She’s a communist in name only. The right just tries to frame her as a radical to scare people,” 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.”

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 $800.

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.

He says he’ll cut more than $6 billion in spending over 18 months – something that Matthei, an economist by training, has called “totally and absolutely impossible.” Kaiser, for his part, promises to go further by slashing up to $15 billion in spending.

This law and order election stands in stark contrast to Chile’s 2021 presidential poll, in which 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. Meanwhile, carjackings, kidnappings and sex trafficking dominated the evening news, stirring panic even as homicide rates have fallen in the last two years.

“It’s convenient for a few 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. “But that’s just not the reality.”