3 things that changed between the first and second rounds in the Chilean elections

The electoral landscape Chilean it changed a lot in less than a month.

If in the first round of the presidential elections, held on November 21, the right-wing candidate won Jose Antonio Kast with an advantage of 2.08% of the votes, in the second, Gabriel Boric obtained a much clearer victory than expected.

With 55.86% of the votes to 99.78% of the count, more than 11 percentage points of difference with respect to his rival, Boric became the president-elect of Chile in a much looser way than expected.

What changed in less than a month? And how did he contribute to the victory of the leftist candidate?

1. The greater participation favored Boric

The analyzes agreed before the Sunday vote that Boric was interested in a high turnout. The candidate’s calls for Chileans to go to the polls followed a clear mobilization strategy that seems to have worked.

If only 47.3% voted in the first round, in the second and final round that percentage rose to 55.5%

“This is a very high turnout for a country like Chile, where it is traditionally low,” Andrés Scherman, a sociologist at the Adolfo Ibáñez University, said in conversation with BBC Mundo.

The expert points out that never before has there been such a pronounced increase in turnout between the first and second rounds, a trend that seems to have favored Boric, who has become the elected president with the highest number of votes.

“Never since voting was no longer mandatory in Chile have so many people voted,” recalls Scherman.

“We had a very polarized election and a lot of uncertainty about who was going to win. As for people it was not trivial who did it, that favored participation ”.

And, as the forecasts pointed out, the mobilization of the electorate benefited Boric.

Where the bets were not correct was the closeness of the race. Despite predicting great equality between Boric and Kast, the leftist candidate finally prevailed with much more slack than expected.

2. The race to moderation

In the second round campaign, both candidates tried to win over the more moderate electorate and abandoned some of their most controversial promises.

For Cristóbal Bellolio, academic at the Adolfo Ibáñez University School of Government, “this was the election in which the candidate who was least scary won. In Chile there are many people who fear the right because of the memory of the Pinochet era and others who fear the left because of what has happened in other countries in the region.

So both Kast, who has shown sympathy with the military regime of Augusto Pinochet and has been frequently described in the media as far-right, and Boric, who jumped into the political arena as the leader of student mobilizations and became the consensus candidate of a heterogeneous amalgam of leftist forces, ended up moderating their messages.

“Both candidates made important concessions in their programs. Kast was at first a climate change skeptic and often spoke of a gay dictatorship, but in the end he abandoned those messages, ”says Bellolio.

In the latest version of his government plan, Kast gave up controversial promises, such as reversing the abortion law or granting an allowance only to married women.

But Boric also softened his offer to the electorate. He parked the concept of “social struggle” and lowered the expectations of the tax reform that was one of his star promises.

The results seem to have shown that Boric was more successful than Kast in his run to the center, and managed to win support that was ultimately key. “He approached the leaders of the Concertación period whom he had criticized and achieved the support of former presidents such as Michelle Bachelet and Ricardo Lagos.”

That sum of supports ended up giving Boric the winning impulse in the race to the center.

3. The example of Antofagasta

One of the unknowns before the election was who would choose the voters of Franco Parisi Y Yasna Provoste, the candidates who were discarded in the first round.

The impression of the experts is that Boric managed to seduce a greater number of them than Kast.

Perhaps where it is best appreciated is in Antofagasta. This mining region in the north of the country was the only one in which Parisi was the most voted candidate in the first round.

In this second Boric obtained an incontestable victory there, with 59.8% of the votes. It was one of the demarcations in which he took the most advantage. “This confirms that many people who did not vote for Boric in the first round but did vote for the new Constitution in 2020 have decided to support him in the second because they want the changes to take place,” says Bellolio.

_________________________________