Chile elects president in highly polarized and uncertain elections

More than 2,800 voting centers opened this Sunday to begin the most important and uncertain elections in the recent history of Chile in which the successor of current President Sebastián Piñera will be elected.

In addition to voting for a new

Chileans elect

, following a polarized campaign in which the main candidates promised to chart very different paths for the country reeling from a recent wave of discontent Social.

Polls leading up to the elections point to a large number of undecided, although they have favored two of the seven candidates running: the former leader of the student protests

and his ideological opposite,

with a history of advocating for the Chilean military dictatorship.

Poll workers train at a school that will serve as a voting center for Sunday's general elections, in Santiago, Chile, on Friday, November 19, 2021. Esteban Felix / AP

It is not expected, however, that either of them will get enough support to exceed the 50% threshold necessary to avoid a second round next month. 

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A short distance from the two favorites are center-right candidate

and center-left former Education Minister

Left-wing presidential candidate Gabriel Boric during a campaign closing rally in Casablanca, Chile, Thursday, Nov. 18, 2021. Esteban Felix / AP

If he wins the elections,

would become the

He was one of the student activists elected to Congress in 2014 after leading protests for better education.

He presents himself as the leader of a broad alliance that includes the Chilean Communist Party and, if elected, claims that he will

to expand social services and boost environmental protection.

He

also

, one of the hallmarks of the free market reforms imposed in the 1980s by the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship.

Right-wing presidential candidate José Antonio Kast during a campaign event in Valdivia, Chile, on Wednesday, November 17, 2021.Jose Luis Saavedra / AP

Kast, 55,

of the newly formed Republican Party, was until recently seen as an

to the far right, having garnered less than 8% of the vote in 2017 as an independent. But this time he has been steadily rising in the polls with a divisive discourse that emphasizes

addition to

- many from Haiti and Venezuela - whom he blames for crime. With him, Chile joins the hardest conservatism boom that has emerged in recent years in the United States, Brazil, Spain, Hungary and France.

A fervent Catholic and father of nine children, Kast has also criticized outgoing president Sebastián Piñera for allegedly betraying Pinochet's economic legacy, which his brother helped implant as president of the dictator's central bank.

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Whoever wins will take over a country in the throes of change, but with the uncertainty of its future after decades of centrist reforms that left Pinochet's economic model intact.

Piñera's decision to raise subway fares in 2019 triggered

that quickly turned into a nationwide clamor for more accessible public services, one that exposed the crumbling foundations of Chile's "economic miracle."

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Severely weakened by the unrest, Piñera reluctantly agreed to a plebiscite to

In May, the assembly in charge of drafting the new Magna Carta was elected

and it is expected to conclude its work sometime next year.

Meanwhile, in a further sign of the tensions that Piñera will leave behind, the president was impeached in the lower house before dodging impeachment by the Senate for a foreign business his family sold in a decade ago. his participation in a mining project while he was serving the first of his two terms.

With information from Efe.