The far-right candidate, Jose Antonio Cast, and the left-wing candidate, Gabriel Boric, are leading in the first round of the presidential election in Chile yesterday, based on the results announced so far by the election authority.
With 71.45% of the vote counted, Jose Antonio Cast, a 55-year-old former lawmaker, holds 28.3% of the vote, while Gabriel Boric, a left-wing lawmaker and former leader of the student movement, is in. in second place with 25.07%, according to the results published by the Electoral Service (SERVEL) of Chile.
Given that any candidate needed to get 50% plus one vote to win the first round, Mr Cast, an apologist for the neo-liberal “economic legacy” of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, and Mr Boric, 35, of the spear in the 2011 demonstrations with a central demand for improvements in the education system, which promises to reform the laissez-faire system of Chile, are heading to face off in the second round.
A rather unexpected development is the fact that Franco Paris, a liberal economist living in the United States who did not go home during the election campaign, comes in third with 13.6% of the vote. This may be a good omen for Mr Cast, as he shares several views on economics with Mr Paris.
Center-left candidate Jasna Provost and center-right candidate Sebastian Sitchel are in fourth and fifth place, respectively, with 12.36% and 11.96% of the vote respectively.
Mr Sitchel, who said after the first results were announced that he had telephoned Mr Cast to congratulate him, said he would call on voters to vote against Mr Boric in the second round because “I do not want the extreme left to win in Chile “.
.
