Chile elections 2021: Chileans in Australia and New Zealand vote in presidential elections

About 7,760 chilean Residents of Australia and New Zealand who are entitled to vote began to cast their ballots this Sunday normally in the presidential elections, the most crucial and uncertain in the recent history of the country.

These elections are important for “Chileans” who live abroad because they show through their vote that they “are part” of Chile, the consul general of Chile in Sydney, Carlos Marín, told Efe, from one of the first voting centers for these elections that open in the world due to time differences.

In Australia, some 5,040 Chileans, mainly in Sydney and Melbourne, are authorized to vote, under the restrictions imposed in those cities by the covid-19 such as the vaccination certificate, while in New Zealand the majority of the 1,719 voters are mainly in Auckland and Wellington.

Daniel Tureo, a young Chilean who arrived in Australia five years ago told Efe from the voting center in Sydney that these elections “mark an important step in what Chile needs”, by mentioning progress in “equal conditions.”

With the extreme right on the rise, the drafting of a new Constitution underway, a pressing inflation after the pandemic and a strong social and institutional crisis that has not stopped since 2019, experts agree that these are the most crucial elections in recent history of the South American country.

In addition, uncertainty surrounds this vote more than ever, in which for the first time and according to the polls, the two candidates who would go on to vote at the moment are not part of the two great coalitions that have shared power since the departure of the dictator Augusto Pinochet (1990).

It is believed that the second round of these elections in which 15 million Chileans are entitled to vote, including more than 71,000 who are abroad, will be defined between the far-right José Antonio Kast and the left-wing candidate Gabriel Boric.

Since the vote is voluntary, no presidential election has exceeded 50%, a threshold that was only reached in the plebiscite for a new 2018 Constitution.