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Will Chile Turn to the Right? Voters Face Presidential Runoff.
Jeannette Jara and José Antonio Kast are facing off on Sunday in a deeply polarized election marked by concerns over security and immigration.
Reporting from Santiago, Chile
A left-wing and a conservative candidate will face off in Chile’s presidential runoff vote on Sunday, in a deeply polarized election marked by concerns over security and immigration.
Polls show that José Antonio Kast, a father of nine with ideological roots in conservative Roman Catholicism and economic neoliberalism, is poised to win. His victory as the candidate for the Republican Party of Chile would be a sharp conservative shift in Chile, positioning the country to join a rightward swing that has swept other Latin American nations recently, including Argentina and Bolivia.
Jeannette Jara, the candidate for the center-left who served as the labor minister in President Gabriel Boric’s government and is a member of the Communist Party of Chile, got the most votes in the first round last month, 27 percent.
Mr. Kast came in second with 24 percent, as the right-wing vote split among at least three candidates. Polls predict that Mr. Kast will consolidate most of those votes in the runoff, but the result will become clear only after voting ends on Sunday night.
Here’s what you need to know:
What are the main issues?
Four years ago, when Chileans elected Mr. Boric as a young left-wing president who had been a protest leader and student organizer, the country had just emerged from widespread unrest, with protesters demanding greater equality and social justice.
Now, those issues are all but absent from the political debate, which has instead focused on security and illegal immigration, helping to bolster the right’s popularity.
In recent years, violent crimes have surged in Chile, with a 50 percent increase in homicide victims in 2024 compared with 2018. The increase, which is largely attributed to the penetration of international criminal networks, has deeply traumatized Chileans.
Now, 63 percent of Chileans consider crime their main preoccupation, double the global average, according to a recent Ipsos survey.
Their second main concern, the polls show, is immigration control, another issue for the right-wing candidates have promised a hard crackdown on. Over 300,000 undocumented migrants are living in the country, according to estimates by Chile’s National Statistics Institute.
“Security, drug trafficking, uncontrolled illegal immigration and criminal organizations are the great concern of the citizenry,” said Pablo Longueira, a veteran right-wing politician and a former Chilean minister. “These are the issues that defined this election.”
Who are the candidates?
While Mr. Kast, 59, a former lawmaker, has fully prioritized security in his agenda and campaign this year, his earlier political career had been defined by a focus on conservative Catholic values, like opposition to abortion.
Mr. Kast has also expressed a level of admiration for Chile’s military dictatorship, led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who ruled the country for nearly two decades starting in the early 1970s. Though he condemned the human rights abuses of the regime, which killed or disappeared thousands of people, he praised its economic achievements and once said that if Pinochet were alive, he would vote for him.
During this year’s presidential bid, his third, Mr. Kast has largely avoided referring to these divisive issues, focusing on crime and proposing to cut the government’s budget by $6 billion.
Ms. Jara, 51, has sought to dispel fear that she might be an extremist, proposing center-left policies, focusing on raising the minimum salary and promising to lower electricity bills and introducing a state subsidy for Chileans aged 25 to 40 to help them buy a house.
She has also promised to crack down on crime and illegal immigration, but many critics have stigmatized her for belonging to the Communist Party in a country that has long embraced economic neoliberalism.
Ms. Jara has sought to leverage her pragmatism and experience in government while putting some distance between her and Mr. Boric’s government, which is quite unpopular. Despite that, she is largely seen as a continuation of the incumbent government at a time when anti-incumbent sentiment is strong.
What do the polls say?
The latest polls predict that Mr. Kast could win 57 percent of the votes and Ms. Jara 43 percent. Chile, however, recently reintroduced compulsory voting, making the result harder to predict.
It was also unclear for whom the 20 percent of voters who earlier chose the candidate Franco Parisi, an economist and former YouTube pundit who proposed a mix of policies, would cast their ballot.
Polls will be open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. local time on Sunday, with the first results expected about 8 p.m.
Pascale Bonnefoy contributed reporting from Santiago, Chile.
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