Santiago de Chile: Chile closes today a week in which the electoral atmosphere gains strength with the view of political programs of parties focused on the primaries to elect the candidates for the November presidential elections, Prensa Latina publishes.
The road begins to clear after the second round to elect the governors of 13 of the 16 regions of the country, held on Sunday, and which, as the analysts predicted, resulted in a new defeat for the right-wing parties.
This election had special significance because for the first time the popular vote decided this position, which is part of the measures to decentralize power in Chile, in addition to offering a perspective of what could happen in the presidential elections.
The polls hit the official coalition Chile Vamos, because of the 16 regions of the country, 15 were won by the opposition, including the Metropolitan Region, the most important of all and the historical bastion of the right.
After that step in the tight electoral schedule of the year, the electoral campaign began this Friday for the presidential primaries scheduled for July 18.
Thus, the candidates of the Communist Party and the Broad Front, and two from the right, were deployed in different regions of the country.
Already on Wednesday, the communist Daniel Jadue was the first of all to present his government program, with a series of objectives that collect many of the claims of millions of Chileans throughout the popular revolt that began in October 2019.
For his part, the broad Front, Gabriel Boric, presented his, which with different nuances contains not a few themes that coincide with Jadue’s proposal.
On the opposite side, on Thursday the candidate of the right-wing Independent Democratic Union, Joaquín Lavín, launched an ‘advance’ of his program, which, as might be expected, contains a reformist approach to the current country model, but far from the proposal of left.
The other candidates are expected to launch their respective programs in the coming days.
But on the long road to La Moneda, definitions are lacking in the Socialist, Por la Democracia and Democracia Cristiana parties, which have not yet agreed to hold a primary in that sector.
There may even be surprises as the People’s List, made up of independents, announced on Tuesday that it will seek to bring its own candidates to parliamentary and very possibly presidential elections.
All this with the ghost of abstentionism fluttering, since in the governors’ ballot only 19.6 percent of the electoral roll went to the polls, a record of non-attendance.
With this precedent, on Tuesday the Chamber of Deputies approved by a large majority a draft constitutional reform to restore compulsory voting in popular elections, which will be seen in the coming days in the Senate with many possibilities of becoming law.
