A consensus-driven communist and a far-right law-and-order candidate vowing mass migrant deportations will duel for president of Chile after topping a first round of voting on Sunday.
Left-wing presidential finalist Jeannette Jara appealed Sunday to Chileans not to let rising crime drive them into the arms of the far right in December's run-off.
"Don't let fear harden your hearts," Jara said after topping the first round of the presidential election, ahead of the far right's José Antonio Kast.
In his own speech, Kast vowed to reverse Chile's shift to the left. "We will rebuild our country," he said after coming a close second.
Kast, 59, is tipped to win the run-off.
Reluctant communist
Jeannette Jara is a rare working-class candidate in a country where political leaders are usually drawn from descendants of the European immigrant elite.
A former labour minister under outgoing centre-left President Gabriel Boric, she grew up in El Cortijo, a deprived neighbourhood in northern Santiago.
"For the first time since our return to democracy [after a 1973-1990 military dictatorship], a person coming from a working-class neighbourhood could rise to govern," she told AFP in a written interview.
The diminutive 51-year-old swept the boards in a left-wing primary as a reformer who pushed through a reduction of the working week from 45 to 40 hours.
She also raised the minimum wage by nearly 50 percent and forced employers to contribute to pension funds for the first time ever.
Jara joined the Communist Party at the age of 14 but insists she is not the party's candidate but that of an eight-party coalition.
She has defied Communist Party orthodoxy by criticising communist-run Cuba and accusing Venezuela's strongman socialist president, Nicolás Maduro, of running a "dictatorship."
That didn't stop her opponents from using her communist affiliation as a stick to beat her.
The eldest of five children, Jara was born to a mechanic father and a housewife mother and worked various jobs, including fruit picking, to help pay her way.
She studied public administration and law, and became a labour leader before entering politics.
Her challenge is to avoid being typecast as weak on crime in a country yearning for the tranquility it enjoyed until a decade ago.
"Public safety will be a priority from day one," Jara has assured.
She has also vowed to guarantee that "every Chilean family can easily make it to the end of the month."
"She's an ordinary person, and she knows what ordinary people suffer and go through," said Constanza Contreras, a 19-year-old student, during a Jara rally in the port city of Valparaíso.
Chile's Trump
José Antonio Kast is the son of a former soldier in Hitler's Nazi army, who emigrated to Chile after the war.
He is also the brother of a former minister under late military dictator Augusto Pinochet.
The ultra-conservative father of nine, 59, alienated moderate voters in the past by advocating a ban on abortion in all circumstances, including rape, and opposing same-sex marriage.
But on his third bid for president, he has studiously avoided identity issues.
The white-haired Republican Party candidate instead focused his attacks on illegal migrants, whom he accuses of being responsible for a surge in organised crime.
He has called on the country's 330,000 undocumented immigrants to sell up and self-deport – or be thrown out and lose everything if and when he takes power.
Kast has also vowed to erect walls and fences, and dig trenches, along Chile's border with Bolivia to halt arrivals from poorer countries to the north.
On security, his model – and that of many Chileans – is El Salvador, whose iron-fisted President Nayib Bukele has locked up thousands of men without charge as part of a crackdown on gangs.
"Bukele is fabulous, I applaud him," Andres Morales, a 62-year-old right-wing voter said approvingly.
On the campaign trail Kast raised eyebrows by twice addressing rallies behind a pane of bulletproof glass.
The move, slammed by Jara as fear-mongering, echoed the measures deployed to protect US President Donald Trump after he survived an assassination attempt on the campaign trail in 2024.
– TIMES/AFP
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