Chileans are voting in a presidential election on Sunday as the ruling leftist coalition is taking on right-wing candidates. There are eight candidates in the race, and none are expected to get the 50% plus one vote needed to win the election outright, and will most likely trigger a run-off between the top two candidates on December 14. The law in Chile prohibits opinion polls 15 days prior to elections, and the last one showed the ruling coalition candidate from the Communist Party, Jeannette Jara, in the lead, with far-right Jose Antonio Kast, from the Republican Party, in second.
Moderate-right politician Evelyn Matthei, a former mayor and senator, led early polls but lagged in recent months and has been on the third spot with libertarian firebrand Johannes Kaiser from the National Libertarian Party.
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The polling stations around Santiago, mostly at schools, saw queues of voters since morning.
Polls are likely to close at 6 pm (2100 GMT), but will remain open if there are still voting lines. Initial results are expected quickly with a full count within hours.
The issues of crime and immigration dominated the electoral agenda, and candidates pledged to combat crime even as they left their local polling stations.
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A major shift from the previous election is a mandatory vote for the 15.7 million registered voters after the last election saw an abstention rate of 53% in the first-round vote.
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“It’s an unprecedented scenario,” said Guillermo Holzmann, a political analyst from the University of Valparaiso, who added the vote would be very difficult to predict.
“(New voters) don’t think in terms of left, right or centre, they think in terms of what changes are needed and what will benefit them,” he said.
Most of Congress is also up for grabs, with the entirety of the 155-member lower house and 23 of the country’s 50 Senate seats in contention.
The ruling leftist coalition currently has a minority in both chambers, and right-wing majorities in both could set the stage for Congress and the presidency to be controlled by the right for the first time since the end of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship in 1990.
