Photo credit: CBS
Chileans might be facing a hard task in the history of their country’s young democracy when they vote on December 12.
The Canadian Press reports that the contestants are hard-right Jose Antonio Kast and communist Jeannette Jara.
Neither candidate cleared the 50% threshold to win in the first round, However, Kast heads into the second round best positioned to succeed after an unprecedented 70% of voters backed an array of right-wing parties in Sunday’s poll.
Kast has vowed to deport Chile’s estimated 300,000 immigrants without legal status. He told supporters on Sunday that his race against Jara was a choice between “two models of society” – chaos and order, stagnation and progress, left and right.
The choice is especially fraught for Chile’s 1.5 million immigrants. The Venezuelans who escaped the repressive socialist government of President Nicolas Maduro to make Chile their home are now haunted by the possibility of fleeing socialism to a fear of deportation.
Many of those immigrants, lacking residency of five years or more, are not eligible to vote.
But the showdown betweenKast, who has built his campaign around faers of organized crime and a surge of anti-immigrant sentiment, and Jara, whose Communist Party supports socialist autocracies in Cuba and Venezuela, has divided the nearly 900,000 immigrants in Chile eligible to vote.
Kazst has repeatedly disparaged Venezuelans as criminals and pledged not only to deport immigrants without legal status, but to also strip them of social benefits, hold them in detention centres and make them pay for their own deportation flights.
If Jara, a former labour minister in the left-wing government of President Gabriel Boric, managed to win next month, she would represent the most left-wing government since the ill-fated presidency of Salvadore Allende who was elected in 1970. However, most political analysts are of the opinion that it would take a miracle for her to win.
