Shrillland wrote:Unfortunately, I cannot make a poll for this one, but I can still give you some basic profiles about the top candidates heading to La Moneda in Santiago for this, Chile's likely last election under the 1980 Constitution on Sunday, November 21(Honduras will get its profile next week).
As I said, this will be the last election under the current constitution, which was soundly repudiated by the public back in May. It'll also be a Congressional election for both houses with the Senate finally growing to its full membership of 50...until the new constitution reorganises things yet again. Maybe Santiago will finally be the legislative capital again....anyway, we'll start the rules for Congress since that'll be second in everyone's minds to the presidential vote. The Chamber of Deputies has 155 members chosen by D'Hondt open list PR in 28 multi-member constituencies with no minimum threshold. Parties are required to have no more than 60% of their candidates to be of the same gender to ensure equality. The Senate will now have 50 members, 27 of which will be chosen by open-list PR from 8 of Chile's 16 regions.
As for the Presidency, it's a simple two-round majority, whomever gets into the top two without a majority will go on to a Sunday, December 19 runoff. There are four candidates polling above 10%, and the electorate has become increasingly fractured of late since Pinochet's Binomial system was eradicated. Let's meet the top four candidates, shall we? Hopefully, they'll be the ones going to the runoff, not like in Peru where Castillo rose almost without trace....
Gabriel Borić - Apuerbo Dignidad(Left to Far Left)
Borić has been politically minded for most of his life. He started at age 13, helping to re-establish the Federation of Secondary Students in his hometown of Punta Arenas, Magallanes y de la Antártica Chilena(or just Magallanes for the rest of us). He became President of the University of Chile Student Federation in 2011 and graduated with a law degree. He was elected to the Chamber in 2013 for the Autonomous Left Party and is nearing the end of his second term(Chileans deputies can only serve three) as a member of the left wing Social Convergence Party. He's only 35, which would make him the youngest President since the modern Republic was formed and the youngest Chilean head of state since the days of the Supreme Directorate in the 1810s-20s. He surprised everyone back in August when he won Apuerbo Dignidad's primary over the initially more popular Daniel Jadue of the Communists.
Apuerbo Dignidad is a mix of left to far left parties, the largest of which are Democratic Revolution, Social Convergence, and the Chilean Communist Party. He's in favour of decentralisation and giving more power to the regions, he's an ardent environmentalist who wants to see the copper stranglehold loosened in favour of more high-tech industry in state-subsidised technology parks,
and wants to overhail Chile's tax system into a more progressive model in order to fund things like government-funded social security and pension programmes as well as the National Care System, a form of universal healthcare. He also supports police reform and further depoliticising the military. Although left wing, he's also opposed to the more authoritarian Commnunist elsewhere in Latin America like Venezuela and Nicaragua.
Borić is currently polling first with an average of 27%.
Sebastian Sichel - Chile Podemos Mas(Centre-right to Right)
Sichel had a hard time as a child, and is one of those rags-to-riches success stories in many respects. got his law degree from the Pontifical Catholic University in the early 2000s and actually had a rock band during his youth called Los Pichuloncos. He also liked to valunteer a lot during his youth, His professional career took off in 2010 when he founded the online newspaper El Dinamo alongside Mariana Aylwin, daughter of the first Post-Pinochet President, Patricio Aylwin. The paper is still going today. Sichel joined the Christian Democrats in 2003, and even worked alongside RN(National Renewal) party members in his school days. From 2011-17, he served as a public relations executive for several lobbyist firms, though he has denied ever being a lobbyist himself. He was a constitutional law professor at San Sebastian University from 2016-18.
His political career started in earnest in 2009, when he ran for Congress in one of Santiago's districts and ended up third, thus he lost. He ran again for another Santiago district in 2013 and again ended up losing to the more right-wing RN and UDI candidates. In 2014, he left PDC and joined the centre-left Ciudadanos party. By 2017, he found himself more in favour of Incumbent President Sebastian Pinera and became an independent the following year. After Pinera's election, Sichel became President of CORFO, Chile's economic development agency. After the social unrest began in Chile in 2019, Pinera's cabinet reshuffle saw Sichel become Social Development and Family Minister. His tenure ended in controversy after he publicly corrected Pinera in a May 2020 press conference, where Sichel clarified that Pinera's planned family relief programme to combat poverty caused by COVID unemployment would bring less improvement than Pinera was promising. Two weeks later, Pinera shifted him to President of the BancoEstado, the state's economic development bank, where he was extremely unpopular with employees. He also oversaw a special withdrawal of 10% of AFP money(AFPs are Chile's private retirement accounts), which lead to the Bank's website crashing.
Although an independent and something of a maverick within the Chile Vamos Coalition(one of the few figures within it to support the constitutional plebiscite back in May), the party is mostly dominated by Pinera's own RN and the more right-wing Independent Democratic Union(UDI), founded by Pinochet's right hand Jaime Guzman. Nonetheless, Siche won the Chile Vamos primary back in July with 49% of the vote, 16 points above his nearest competitor, mayor of Santiago's Los Condes community and literal "Chicago Boy" Joaquin Lavin. Siche wants to reduce the current number of 24 ministries to 18 by merging eight of them into other departments and creating two new ones, a Ministry of Internal Security to handle crime and drugs, and a Ministry of Public Administrative Affairs to streamline the bureaucracy. He promises support for child food programmes, housing and mental health, while mostly being in favour of free market solutions elsewhere. He would also legalise same-sex adoption and same-sex marriage, a view shared by some of the other candidates.
Sichel is in second place polling 22%.
Jose Antonio Kast - Christian Social Front(Far Right)
Kast is....interesting to say the least. His Parents were originally from Bavaria and his father was actually a Wehrmacht officer during World War II. He has nine siblings, one of whom (Miguel Kast) was from the original "Chicago Boys", Pinochet's Labour Minister in the early 80s, a member of Odeplan in the early days, and later President of the Central Bank before his death in 1983. In the 80s, he was a prminent member University of Chile's Student Federation as a member of the Guildists. He met Guzman in the mid 80s, who encouraged him to join the UDI. He actually appeared in a government circular for the 1988 Plebiscite to keep Pinochet in power. In 1990, he founded a law firm and worked for his parents' real estate company as well.
In 1996, he took his first major stride into politics by running for mayor of Buin, Santiago Region. He came in second, so he became a city councillor for four years. In the 2001 election, he ran on the UDI platform for the Chamber and would serve his full three terms for one of the Santiago Region districts and another term for another district. In 2007, he became UDI Chamber Leader and stayed there for the rest of his time in Congress. He ran for UDI President in 2008 but came in second. He would, however, become the UDI's secretary-general from 2012-14. In 2015, he planned to run for the UDI in the 2017 Chile Vamos Primary. When Pinera's return to the campaign trail saw UDI backing him, however, Kast left the UDI and decided to run as an independent. He ended up well above the '17 polls getting nearly 8% of the vote in the first round, a sign that some voters likes his message. Over 2018-19, Kast founded the Republican Party as a platform for his next presidential run. Earlier this year, his was the only explicitly right wing list for the Constitutional Convention election, which saw the Republicans get four seats.
With all this in mind, to call Kast controversial may well be an understatement. His FSC is almost entirely dominated by his own Republican Party, though the smaller Christian Conservative Party also maintains a presence. He maintains that Pinochet was defending liberty during his regime, and has supported every hard-right-wing leader in the Americas over the last 25 years from both Fujimoris to Bukele, Bolsonaro, Trump, and so on. He supports creating an immigration enforcement agency similar to ICE in the United States, plans to reduce immigration to Chile, wants to remove 10 government ministries in the name of streamlining, and favours military involvement in Arucania where a continued low-level conflict involving the Mapuche has been going for years, He also supports repealing the "Three Instances" law passed in 2017 that legalised abortion in specific circumstances. He's also very anti-LGBTQ+, infamously saying that "La Moneda has surrendered to a gay dictatorship" when La Moneda had rainbow-coloured lights in 2017 in support of the International Day Against Homophobia.
Kast is currently polling third at 15%.
Yasna Provoste - New Social Pact(Centre-left)
Provoste is a Diaguita Native American who spent most of her youth in Atacama. When she was nine years old, she was actually a national gymnastics champion, and specialised in physical education at Playa Ancha University of Educational Sciences. Provoste first got into politics after studying local government and decentralisation in Colombia. She's been part of the PDC since she was 14. Her first major political position was as Atacama's regional director of the National Women's Service, which she held for a year from 1996-97. Starting in '97 under President Ricardo Lagos, her political star seemed to be pointing her towards La Moneda. She was appointed Governor of Atacama's Huasco Province in 1997, moved up to Intendent of Atacama(effectively Governor of the Region)in 2001, and from there, Lagos brought her into the national cabinet as Planning Minister from 2004-06. After Michelle Bachelet was elected in 2005, she was moved up again, this time to the Ministry of Education...and then things went downhill.
In February 2008, the Auditor General reported that upwards of C$200 billion(US$500 million) in Ministry funds meant to go to public and subsidised private schools weren't accounted for. Worse, the Santiago Education Minister, Franka Grez, was funneling C$262 billion(US$600 million) to her brothers. Under the premise of her being the place where the buck was supposed to stop, Jose Antonio Kast(see above) led the charge to have Provoste impeached for not doing anything to stop the problem. It was seen by many as a political impeachment to try to stop Provoste from going further up the chain. Ultimately, she was impeached(almost exclusively by UDI, RN, and allied parties) on five counts, and ended up convicted on one and just barely escaping conviction on a second by one vote.
After spending a year in Canada, Provoste got a heroine's welcome when she returned to Atacama and became regional PDC President. In 2013, she was elected to the Chamber for Atacama. She only spent one term there before being elected to the Senate in 2017. In March of '21, she became Senate President for an annual term, but she resigned in August to focus on her presidential run.
The NPS mostly includes the old-guard centre and centre-left parties, including PDC, Ciudadanos, and the Socialist Party. She's in favour of pension reform without Borić's planned overhaul to a publicly-funded system, wants to work for increased indigenous protections, and has spoken in favour of a national UBI. She's also in favour of signifcant reform for the Carabinieros, the National Police, after they were seen as excessive during the 2019-20 protests.
Provoste is in fourth with a 10% average.
So, what's your choice, NSG? I'm not normally one for extremism, but Borić is representative of the changes that Chileans want in the new Constitution and of what they need, so I'm backing him myself.
I am traditionally drawn towards Sichel. Been center right all of my life and I don't think I've changed. I find Kast like a poor attempt of being edgy, Boric could be a plausible compromise, but over-sloganning and over-branding also makes me cringe, and Yasna just gives me bad memories.
That being said. Sebastián Sichel proved to just be a bad candidate in last night's debate. I don't imagine him creating dialogue with a powerful oposition in the way I wish Piñera had been able to. He interrupted all the time, did bad jokes and was frankly childish in his engagements, lowering to Kast's and Artés's level.
I am honestly lost, and last night took all my hopes for the future of this country out of my body. I am actively considering migration.
