Moderates win: Sichel and Boric are presidential candidates for Chile’s November elections

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The moderates won. Gabriel Boric, the Frente Amplio representative, and Sebastián Sichel, an independent with a complex past, will be the representatives of Apruebo Dignidad and Chile Vamos in the next presidential elections on November 21.

Against all odds and after counting more than 75% of the votes, Sichel won with 48.7%, while Boric came in at 60%.

The Minister of Social Development under President Piñera between 2018-2019 and the president of the state-owned Banco Estado until December 2020 won against the great favorite: the former mayor Joaquín Lavin, of the ultra-conservative Independent Democratic Union (UDI).

He also competed against his former cabinet colleagues Mario Desbordes, from the conservative Renovación Nacional (RN), and Ignacio Briones, from the liberal Evópoli.

After having passed through several parties of the political spectrum, including the Christian Democrats (DC), Sichel defines himself as the only “center” candidate and went to these primaries without the support of any specific party.

For his part, the deputy of the leftist Frente Amplio (FA) beat the communist mayor of the capital’s Recoleta neighborhood, Daniel Jadue, who led the polls for months but was involved in various controversies in the final stretch of the campaign.

With a proposal to change the current neoliberal model more than the communist one and with a more conciliatory tone, Boric has been a deputy since 2014 and burst into the political scene in the great student demonstrations of a decade ago in favor of free education.

THE YOUNGEST CANDIDATES

Sichel (43) and Boric (35) are the two youngest candidates in the primaries, which have attracted more voters than expected, despite the pandemic, Friday’s holiday, and electoral fatigue, since these are the fifth elections of this year after the constituent, municipal and first and second round of the regional ones.

The center-left did not manage to reach an agreement to register a common candidacy. However, everything points to the fact that the president of the Senate, Christian Democrat Yasna Provoste, will file to run before the deadline of August 23.

The big unknown is whether she will receive the backing of the Socialist Party (PS), which a priori opts for Paula Narváez, who was a spokesperson in Michelle Bachelet’s second term (2014-2018).

The primaries take place when Chile is coming out of a virulent second wave and two weeks after the installation of the Constitutional Convention, composed of 155 elected citizens and in charge of drafting a new constitution to replace the current one, drafted during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).

The constituent process was precisely the way out by politics to the wave of protests that broke out in October 2019 against inequality and the Government, the most serious since the end of the military regime, with some thirty deaths and thousands of wounded.