Chile’s regional elections revive the center-left and further sink the right wing

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The results of Chile’s regional elections, held this Sunday, June 13, in which the center-left candidates won the capital and 9 of the country’s 16 governorships, gave a boost to a long-standing pact of parties that had not obtained good results for years.

The Constituent Unity (UC), a bloc formed by the Socialist Party (PS), the Christian Democrats (DC), and other traditiona center left parties, which has shared power with the right-wing for the last 30 years, was the great winner of these elections.

The elections were the first time that Chileans could elect the governors of the country’s 16 regions, making them a historic step towards the country’s decentralization.

“I want to call on the people who did not vote for us to join our project, a project of urban and territorial justice for the entire region”, acclaimed the Christian Democrat Claudio Orrego, the new governor of the capital, who won, with 52.7% of the vote, over Karina Oliva, of the left-wing Frente Amplio (FA).

The UC had been losing supporters for years, especially after its defeat in the 2017 presidential elections, and experienced its latest failure in the constituent elections in May, where they obtained only 25 of the 155 seats in parliament, and in the municipal elections held on the same occasion, achieving only a handful of mayoralties, a dismal harvest that rattled the opposition.

“It’s a good result for the center-left party, but it’s important to remember that very few people voted,” Claudia Heiss, head of the political science department at the University of Chile, said of the election Sunday, in which a historic low of 19.6% of the electorate voted.

According to Heiss, Orrego managed to unite the vote of the centrist left but was also supported by the ruling right, which, in the absence of a candidate in the second round, saw in him a “lesser evil”.

AN EYE ON THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS

The struggle for the capital was the most important battle in this election since the elected candidate will govern more than one-third of the 19 million inhabitants of the country and, according to experts, could become the “bastion” of a candidate for the presidential elections of November 21.

“The thesis that center-left forces are a presidential option is now gaining space,” explained the director of the School of Government at the University of San Sebastian, Jaime Abedrapo.

THE RIGHT-WING WAS THE BIG LOSER

The pro-government right-wing that ran for the Chile Vamos bloc was the big loser: it only managed to win in one region, Araucanía, in the country’s center, known for being an area of conflict between the authorities and indigenous peoples.

“It is evident that Chile wants a profound change in its leadership and the vote represents the failure of the current (right-wing) government,” said Carmen Frei, president of Christian Democrats.

Those elected, who will take office on July 14 for four-year terms, will automatically become authorities and, in many cases, territorial counterpowers to a centralized Santiago. However, their attributions are very limited and framed according to the national budget, which reduces their margin of action.

WOMEN AND INDEPENDENTS

Of the 13 candidates elected in this second round, two are independents who ran without party affiliation, and three are considered as such even though they ran on political party lists.

These results are in line with last May’s elections, in which a vote against the political elites won and where many independents won. One example is Rodrigo Mundaca, a water rights activist, who won as governor of Valparaiso, the epicenter of Chile’s drought.

However, only two of the 16 governorships will be in the hands of women, a result that clashes with that of the constituent elections, where women outvoted their male counterparts but obtained half of the seats by a parity mechanism that favored them.

VERY LOW VOTER TURNOUT

Only 2.5 of the 13 million people eligible to vote in these elections were held at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and with the capital under confinement measures. This is the lowest turnout since the return to democracy in 1990, well below the minimum recorded in the 2016 municipal elections, when only 34.9% of those eligible voted.

Since voting ceased to be compulsory in 2012, no election had exceeded 50% turnout, except last October’s plebiscite, when 50.9% voted.

“This motivates me that once and for all we advance to compulsory voting, I hope that in the election at the end of the year it will be so”, said in his networks Mario Desbordes, who aspires to be the candidate of the right-wing in the presidential elections to be held at the end of this 2021.

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