Chile's Presidential Election - Extremes on the Ballot

Latin America Correspondent Jon Bonfiglio speaks to Henry Bonsu for Times Radio.

Transcript

Henry Bonsu: 0:00

Okay, let's go to Latin America now, where Chileans are set to go to the polls on Sunday. A Trump-inspired candidate promising tough anti-migrant measures is the frontrunner with security a key issue on the agenda. Let's get a preview with Latin America Correspondent and analyst Jon Bonfiglio. Jon, hello to you. Okay, now let's uh sketch out the the key lines in this because there's a guy that many people won't have heard of, someone called Jose Antonio Kast. He's seen as the potential Trump, the next president of Chile. Why is he so interesting, do you think?

Jon Bonfiglio: 0:35

Yeah, and actually he's the far right candidate, a former congressman who is modelling his security program on El Salvador's hard liner in Nayib Bukele. But actually, interesting what you were just saying on the previous story about removing the country from international treaties, because there's somebody who's even further to the right, Johann Kaiser, a libertarian YouTuber, who said that if he gets elected to the presidency, he's going to remove Chile from all human rights and climate accords. He is aping Javier Milei in Argentina and his anarcho-libertarianism, and he wants to create and place statues of Augusto Pinochet right across the country. And then on the left we have we're used to political extremism and political polarization these days, but on the left we have Jeanette Jara, who is openly affiliated to the Communist Party. Look, I mean, Latin America is undoubtedly entering a period of consequential elections under the shadow of Trump's America, which is currently intent on what appears to be hemispheric control. And one undoubtedly one of the most important of these takes place in the form of a first-round election in Chile on Sunday, the fourth largest economy in South America, with other big democracies to follow.

Henry Bonsu: 1:50

And what's your sense of where the Chilean people are after four years of a sort of centre-left government? Is that right?

Jon Bonfiglio: 1:58

It is, yeah. Gabriel Boric, who was elected after national demonstrations/ riots and then COVID, of course. There's definitely an ongoing narrative about the-Chile-that-no-longer-exists, which is achieving traction. It's also implicitly a condemnation of Gabriel Boric's inability to deliver on his proposed agenda of social change. Now, some of this relates to external factors, not necessarily his fault, and some of it to his misreading of how ready or not Chile was for change. But there's undoubtedly a feeling that the presidency of Boric has been one of missed opportunities, and interestingly, and again, I think this plays into a n international narrative, one which has carved open opportunities by default for the extreme right.

Henry Bonsu: 2:50

Right. And another reason the extreme right is on the rise in Chile and elsewhere is the arrival of very large numbers of people who are not Chilean. And I'm looking at some figures here, more than half a million Venezuelans arrived there since their own country's economic collapse.

Jon Bonfiglio: 3:07

Yeah, look, undoubtedly, I mean, this is not just a Chile-specific issue. It this continues to relate to the migration fallout, which we've covered on your show before, Henry, in which the last decade of economic meltdown in Venezuela has absolutely impacted the region. I mean, the statistic which we've used before, but is remains staggering nevertheless, is that it is the single biggest human migration, human movement in the history of Latin America. And that does also relate to insecurity. There is a feeling - whether perceived because these are groups of people that people don't recognize - or tangible in that there is an encroachment of transnational criminal organizations, including the infamous, by this stage, Tren de Aragua group from. It's not just that though. The economy, of course, as ever, is a big issue. Chile's economy is growing at a rate of two and a half percent year on year, but the mood on the ground is definitely one of distrust, volatility. So yeah, people are on the whole worried. They definitely know one thing, that standard political operatives, that the standard operating procedure is not something which can deliver the future. So on the table is a stark choice between the extreme right, the extremer right, and the extreme left.

Henry Bonsu: 4:32

Well, given that you've got two extremes on the right, and then one extreme leftist, the ruling Communist Party candidate Jeanette Jara, won't that benefit her? That means she gets into the final round, doesn't it?

Jon Bonfiglio: 4:46

Yes, so this is it, this is interesting because as is common in Latin America with presidential elections, there is a first round which usually sort of wiggles down to a couple of candidates, unless someone achieves over 50% of them in the first round, which is really seriously unlikely to happen in this particular election. So then the question is, with the two remaining candidates to go to the final round on the 14th of December in a month's time, is where do the other votes fall? Now, historically, we could pretty much predict in a sort of more normal political landscape where those votes would would land, but now with these extremes, which in some ways approximate one to another, actually they could go right across the political spectrum. So it's impossible to know who's going to come out the winner.

Henry Bonsu: 5:29

All right, Jon Bonfiglio we'll be back with you very soon. Thank you very much indeed for joining us on Times Radio.