Runoff in Chile: Kast and Boric face each other for the last time in a lukewarm debate with winks to the center

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The last face to face between the two antagonistic candidates that on Sunday will dispute the Chilean Presidency, the conservative religious lawyer José Antonio Kast and the far-left congressman Gabriel Boric, was lukewarm, with winks once again to the center electorate and without real programmatic novelties.

As happened last Friday in the other presidential debate of the campaign, the two extremist aspirants to La Moneda (seat of Government) made an effort to show their more moderate face, aware that neither of them reached 30 % of the votes in the first round of November 21 and that elections are won by the center.

Read also: Check out our coverage on Chile

Kast, who came first with 27.8% of the votes, defended the values of the traditional right (fatherland, family, and order) and insisted that the neoliberalism installed during the military dictatorship (1973-1990) and deepened during the transition is the only model that creates wealth.

“We were a model for the world, and we have to recover that (…) I do not want to be a president who raises his fist; I want to be a president who dialogues and welcomes”, he said.

Boric, for his part, reiterated that to have better health services and free education, it is necessary to increase the role of the state and raise taxes. However, he tried to scare away the fear that his alliance with the Communist Party aroused in specific business sectors.

“We want to advance towards a welfare state. The title they give it does not worry me. If he is a social democrat, good luck”, affirmed the former student leader, who came second with 25.8% of the votes and now leads most polls.

OPEN SCENARIO

Observers, however, warn that the elections are the most uncertain in 30 years, that the result will be decided vote by vote, that there are many undecided voters, and that abstention will be high.

For Jaime Abedrapo, director of the School of Government at the Universidad San Sebastián, none of the candidates wanted to “risk too much” and limited themselves to “repeating their most attractive proposals and avoiding the most controversial ones”.

“Many of their phrases were identical to those of the previous debate,” he told Efe.

It has always been said that whoever gets the most votes in the first round gets to La Moneda -something happening since 1999.

THE MAIN CLASHES

Same-sex marriage was recently approved in Chile, and sexual diversity was one of the issues that raised the temperature of the debate.

One of the tensest moments was when Boric threw in Kast’s face that a few years ago, he referred to the fight for LGTBI rights as “gay dictatorship” and said that trans actress Daniela Vega, star of the Oscar-winning “A Fantastic Woman”, was a “man”.

The religious conservative apologized and assured that “he would not describe her in those terms again”: “He perceives that she is a woman and, therefore, we respect her right, and today there is a law that must be complied with”.

“Diversities are going to be welcomed and protected; dissidents are still being killed and discriminated against. When a candidate talks about gay dictatorship, imagine what his government will be like”, Boric replied.

Abedrapo pointed out that the leader of the Republican Party “has moderated his discourse quite a bit” and that he is “more tolerant with diversity” than he was before.

Tension returned to the set at the end of the debate when Kast brought to light the accusation against Boric of having verbally harassed a former party colleague, something the former student leader denies.