SANTIAGO: Chileans headed to the polls on Sunday to vote in the Andean nation’s most divisive presidential election in decades, with two candidates offering starkly different visions for the future from pensions and privatisation to human rights.

Voters were choosing between Gabriel Boric, a 35-year-old former student protest leader allied to the Communist Party, and ultra-conservative Jose Antonio Kast, a law-and-order candidate and defender of former dictator Augusto Pinochet. “I want real change,” said Lucrecia Cornejo, 72, a seamstress while waiting in line to vote for Boric, the candidate for a broad leftist front. She cited inequalities in education, pensions and health that Boric has pledged to fix.

“I want equality, for us not to be as they call us the ‘broken ones’, more fairness in education, health and salaries.” Kast, who has been likened to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and who has become an icon for Chile’s “unapologetic right”, said in an open letter on Saturday that “two models for the nation are going face-to-face”. He offered “change with order and stability”.

Both candidates come from outside the centrist political mainstream that has largely ruled since Chile returned to democracy in 1990 following the years of Pinochet’s military dictatorship. The final opinion polls ahead of the run-off election showed Boric widening his lead against Kast, though most polls show a close race. Polling stations close at 6pm and initial results are expected soon after.

Both candidates got under 30pc of the vote in a fragmented first round vote in November and have been battling hard since then to win over sometimes sceptical moderate voters in the Chile, which is the world’s largest copper producer and has a population of some 19 million.

“It is not that I am 100pc with Boric, but now it is time to decide between two opposing options and Boric is my choice,” said Javier Morales, 29, a construction worker.

Published in Dawn, December 20th, 2021