Chileans to vote in presidential election split | News

Both candidates offer completely different perspectives on the future of the country, with most pre-election polls projecting a narrow race.

Chileans will go to the polls on Sunday to vote in the most divisive presidential election in decades in the Andean nation, and the two candidates offer completely different perspectives on the future.

On the one hand, Gabriel Boric, a 35-year-old former student protest leader who promises social change, has advanced in pre-election polls against a 55-year-old anti-conservative Jose Antonio Kast, a lawyer who has won strong support. line of law and order.

“Two models for the nation are at odds,” Kaste wrote in a letter to the local newspaper El Mercurio on Saturday, citing plans for Boric’s “complete transformation” and hopeful “changes in order and stability.”

Polls open at 08:00 and close at 18:00 (11:00 – 21:00 GMT) and the first results are expected on Monday morning.

Both candidates are outside the centrist political current that has dominated Chile since returning to democracy in 1990, after years of military rule by General Augusto Pinochet, whose ghost is still a ghost. large looms.

Both candidates received less than 30 percent of the vote a fragmented first round in November and since then they have fought hard at times to win over moderate voters to skeptics, with a population of about 19 million in a copper-rich country.

“It’s not 100 percent that I’m with Boric, but now is the time to decide between the two opposing options and Boric is my choice,” said Javier Morales, 29, a construction worker who attended this week’s closing ceremony of Boric’s campaign.

Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online. It has been driven by economic growth, but has been attacked for creating sharp divisions between rich and poor.

Kaste, meanwhile, has defended Pinochet’s legacy and lashed out at Boric for his alliance with the Communist Party in his broad left-wing coalition, which has resonated with supporters.

“I feel like Chile needs a bit of order,” said Florencia Vergara, a 25-year-old dental student who is accepting Kast as a “lesser evil” to the economy. “I like his proposals on economic issues, even though I don’t agree with all his political ideals.”

Boric, who led a student protest in 2011 to demand better and cheaper education, wrote in an open letter that his government would make the changes demanded by Chileans in 2019 in broad social uprisings.

“(That means) having a real social security system that doesn’t leave people behind, ending a hateful disruption between the health of the rich and the health of the poor, while definitely advancing women’s freedoms and rights,” she said.

The 2019 protests, which lasted for months and sometimes turned violent, sparked a formal process to renew Chile’s decades-old constitution, a text to challenge next year’s referendum vote.

Recent election polls show that the gap against Boric Kast is widening, although most polls show a tight race.