Chile elects a president in anticipation of a new constitution.

 

Chile holds elections on Sunday for a new president to take over amid a fast-changing political landscape, two years after deadly protests that opened the path for the country to eventually discard its dictatorship-era constitution.

There are currently seven contenders to succeed the unpopular President Sebastian Pinera, just months after an election to pick a constitution-drafting committee saw voters heavily reject conventional political parties in power since democracy began 31 years ago.

The candidates span the political gamut from left to right, with centrists showing to be the least popular in polls, which also found that half of the 15 million eligible voters are undecided.

Gabriel Boric, 35, of the leftist Approve Dignity coalition, which includes the Communist Party, and far-right candidate Jose Antonio Kast, 55, of the Republican Party, are the front-runners, with around a quarter of declared voter intention for each.

Silvia Gutierrez, a 60-year-old nurse from Santiago, said, “I have not felt such anxiety since the 1988 referendum” that ended dictator Augusto Pinochet’s 16-year dictatorship.

Her family, which has always supported the same center-left alliance, is now “split; some on the right, others on the left,” she told AFP.

Chileans will elect a new 155-member Chamber of Deputies and nearly two-thirds of Senators on Sunday, in what will be their fourth election in 18 months.

When the country determines whether or not to adopt a new constitution in a mandated referendum next year, the new-look Congress will be in place.

A draft is already being prepared, a concession achieved when protestors took to the streets in October 2019 to criticize low salaries and pensions, bad public health care and education, and “persistently high inequality” between rich and poor, according to a recent OECD assessment.

The Pinochet-era constitution, which commentators say has made the country prosperous by promoting private enterprise in all fields, but at the expense of the poor and working classes, was primarily blamed for the current crisis.

During weeks of protests in 2019, dozens of people died, marking Chile’s worst social crisis in decades.

The administration eventually agreed to hold a referendum, and roughly 80% of voters approved a new constitution to be drafted by an elected body a year later.

The constitutional convention was elected in May, with independent candidates, mostly on the left, sweeping the board as voters rejected traditional political parties in a shot across the bow. The Washington Newsday Brief News is a daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C.