Chile elections 2021: Piñera votes and asks that the new president be “everyone’s president”

The outgoing president of Chile, Sebastian Piñera, affirmed this Sunday that the new president should be “the president of all” during the polarized ballot in which the former student leader of the left competes Gabriel Boric and the ultraconservative Jose Antonio Kast.

“Tonight we are going to have a new president elected by all of you and I believe that whoever is elected should never forget that he must be the president of all Chileans, not just those who supported him.” Piñera said after casting his vote.

Pinera added that Chile he is “living in a climate of excessive polarization, confrontation and disputes”, and wished the new president “wisdom, prudence and success.”

“We may have differences, but we all want the best for the country. (…) Chileans have the capacity for dialogue and agreement, but politics seems like a permanent war ”, he claimed.

With two candidates bringing more drastic proposals than those of the large center-right and center-left blocs that have been sharing power for three decades, the next president will be either the most leftist since Salvador Allende (1970-1973) or the most right-wing. since Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).

The latest polls anticipate that Boric would win the ballot, a 35-year-old deputy -the minimum age to run for office-, in favor of achieving a welfare state with a feminist, environmentalist and regionalist accent.

Second would be Kast, a 55-year-old Catholic lawyer, who seeks to maintain the current neoliberal model with changes, lower taxes, confront irregular migration with a heavy hand and is against gay marriage and all forms of abortion.

Piñera assured that he is confident that the results will be known tonight, although he clarified that, if there is a very narrow margin between the candidates, they must be ratified by an electoral tribunal and the process could be delayed.

Experts agree that this scenario is plausible, taking into account the large number of voters who remained undecided in the last polls and that in the first round only separated them two percentage points (Kast obtained 27.9% support and Boric 25 , 8%).

The president concluded with a categorical call to go to the polls, especially after a first round in which only 47% of the electoral roll participated.

“We hope to have a democratic, transparent and clean act. We want to hear people’s voices loud and deep, ”he said.

The next president, who will take office in March 2022 for a period of 4 years, will have to heal the wounds left by the social crisis of 2019; to lead the implementation of the norms of the new Constitution -in case they are approved in an exit plebiscite-, and to face the economic challenges left by the pandemic.

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