SANTIAGO:Chilean leftist Gabriel Boric won the country’s presidential runoff election on Sunday, as far-right rival Jose Antonio Kast conceded defeat with results showing a nearly 10-point gap between the deeply polarized candidates.
With over 83% of votes counted, Boric had 55.52% versus Kast’s 44.48%, and his lead appeared to be widening.
“I just spoke to @gabrielboric and congratulated him on his great success,” Kast said on Twitter. “From today he is the elected President of Chile and he deserves all our respect and constructive collaboration. Chile is always first.”
The victory caps a major comeback for Chile’s progressive left since widespread protests in 2019 shone a spotlight on inequality in the country’s market-orientated economic model and triggered an official redraft of the constitution.
“I want real change,” said Lucrecia Cornejo, 72, a seamstress waiting in line to vote for Boric, the candidate for a broad leftist front. She cited inequalities in education, pensions and healthcare that Boric has pledged to fix.
“I want equality, for us not to be as they call us the ‘broken ones,’ more fairness in education, health and salaries.”
The election was the nation’s most divisive in decades, with the two candidates offering starkly different visions from pensions and privatization to human rights.
Boric https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/student-leader-president-chiles-boric-eyes-historic-election-win-2021-12-15, a 35-year-old former student protest leader whose coalition includes the Communist Party, was up against Kast https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/chiles-bolsonaro-hard-right-kast-rises-with-frank-talk-crime-focus-2021-11-16, 55, a law-and-order candidate and defender of former dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Kast, who has been likened to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and who has become a hero to Chile’s “unapologetic right,” said in an open letter on Saturday that “two models for the nation are going face-to-face”.
Both candidates come from outside the centrist political mainstream that has largely ruled since Chile returned to democracy in 1990 following the years of Pinochet’s military dictatorship. Both moderated their positions in recent weeks to win over centrist voters.
“It is not that I am 100% with Boric, but now it is time to decide between two opposing options and Boric is my choice,” said Javier Morales, 29, a construction worker.
Florencia Vergara, 25, a dentistry student, had supported Kast as the “lesser evil” for the economy. “I like his proposals on economic issues, although I don’t agree with all his political ideals,” she said. “But Chile needs a bit of order.”
GHOST OF PINOCHET
Boric supporters say he will overhaul the country’s market-oriented economic model that dates back to Pinochet. It has been credited for driving economic growth, but attacked for creating sharp divides between rich and poor.
Kast has defended Pinochet’s legacy and aimed barbs at Boric for his alliance with the Communist Party in his leftist coalition, which has resonated with supporters https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/the-coup-destroyed-us-memories-pinochet-resonate-chiles-crossroads-election-2021-12-17. Some Kast voters shouted that Chile would “never be Marxist” on Sunday.
“I support Jose Antonio Kast because he is a just man,” Marisol Araneda, 49, a merchant selling fruits and vegetables, said on Sunday as she headed to vote, adding she feared Boric would take the country in the direction of socialist Venezuela.
Boric, who rose to prominence leading a student protest in 2011 to demand better and more affordable education, wrote in an open letter that his government would make the changes Chileans had demanded in widespread social uprisings in 2019.
“(That means) having a real social security system that doesn’t leave people behind, ending the hateful gap between healthcare for the rich and healthcare for the poor, advancing without hesitation in freedoms and rights for women,” he said.
The 2019 protests, which lasted months and at times turned violent, sparked a formal process to redraft Chile’s decades-old constitution, a text that will face a referendum next year.
Businessman Jorge Valdivia, 54, a Boric supporter, said the vote was a chance for the country to close a chapter on the past.
“We can close the dark, damaging and abusive model that benefited a small minority,” he said.
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