Chile faces a very wide range of candidates in Sunday’s presidential election, with front-runners including a longtime Communist Party member and two ultra-conservatives.
Some analysts expect voters to choose a different direction for the South American country as the country faces rising crime rates, a surge in immigration and dissatisfaction with the policies of left-wing President Gabriel Boric. However, it is still unclear how much of a difference there will be.
Here’s a look at who’s running and their campaign promises.
Who are the candidates?
There are eight candidates on the ballot, with at least three front-runners including José Antonio Casto, an ultra-conservative politician who has promised to make Chile great again. Johannes Kaiser is a liberal and is considered even more radical than Kast. and Janet Hara, a longtime Communist Party member who distanced herself from the left-wing government.
The leader in opinion polls is Mr. Jarrah, 51, a Communist Party member and former labor minister in the left-wing Boric government.
Despite being the only candidate in Chile’s left-wing coalition, she does not have an uncontested path to the presidency. Her association with the unpopular Bolić government has weighed on her, and she has gradually distanced herself from her party, even threatening to suspend her Communist Party membership if elected president.
She operates on a commitment to fostering development through domestic production, protecting workers’ rights and raising the minimum wage. She also acknowledged the country’s security concerns, saying it should build more prisons, increase the number of law enforcement agencies and protect its borders with more advanced technology.
According to most polls, her closest rival is Kast, a far-right politician often compared to Donald Trump by analysts. Many of his policies mirror those of the U.S. president, including his proposal to close the border and remove the roughly 300,000 people who entered Chile illegally.
Mr. Casto has always opposed abortion rights, same-sex marriage and immigration, and during the last presidential election he proposed digging trenches along several parts of the northern border to prevent illegal immigration.
The Associated Press reported four years ago that his German-born father was a member of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party, but the issue was not brought up much in the campaign. Kast has repeatedly denied that his father was a supporter of the Nazi party, explaining that he was forcibly conscripted into the German army. CNN has reached out to the party for comment on the Associated Press report.
Casto founded the Chilean Republican Party in 2019 and is widely credited with bringing far-right positions to the national stage. But in the final weeks of the campaign, another ultra-conservative emerged. Some consider it more radical than Kast.
Kaiser, a YouTuber turned politician, gained attention in the final months of the election with his hard-line proposals, including a free market economy, austerity and tougher punishments for criminals.
In a recent interview with Agence France-Presse, the far-right politician proposed sending immigrants with criminal records to El Salvador’s notorious prison, a terrorist confinement center known as Secot.
Dissatisfied with the Chilean Republican Party, Kaiser and four other members founded a new right-wing party in 2024 with ties to libertarian ideology.
In a February 2024 interview with CNN Chile, Kaiser said his presidential campaign was more to the right than Kast, declaring, “On my right is Genghis Khan.”
Insecurity is perhaps the biggest problem in the South American country, where the number of crime victims has steadily increased since 2021, according to the National Institute for Statistics.
“I believe that security issues will definitely be at the center of Chile’s elections, as in many Latin American countries. The fight against organized crime and criminal gangs, and all the lamentations of a society that feels held hostage by high-level drug trafficking and other activities,” Luz Araceli González, a professor of international relations at the Monterrey Institute of Technology, told CNN.
All candidates are promising to be tougher on crime, but for now it remains to be seen whose proposals will resonate most with voters.
Under Chilean law, if no candidate receives a majority of votes on Sunday, the two front-runners will face a run-off on December 14.
Hara is the favorite to win the first round by a narrow margin, but even if she advances to a run-off, she is expected to face a tougher challenge from a more unified right-wing party.
“There are voters who don’t identify with either the left or the right or the level of polarization in between, but instead want solutions and answers, and today that answer is on the right,” said political analyst Guillermo Holtzman. “What is currently being tested is the most extreme right, which is considered not only sensible, but rational and electable.”
Holzmann argues that Casto’s chances of winning this election are greater than in previous elections because of issues that Boric’s government has not resolved, such as rising insecurity and fighting organized crime.
“Chile approaches this election with a degree of uncertainty,” he said. “While we have been anticipating a presidential runoff for months, it is clear that there will be a shift in ideological direction with the incoming administration.”
