With a victory that is equivalent to a boxing knockout, the Chilean left-wing leader Gabriel Boric won the presidential ballot by a very large margin that opposed him in Chile to the ultra-conservative José Antonio Kast. By the time the poll reached 92.12%, Boric had scored over 55% versus Kast’s 44%, with a crushing lead of more than eleven points that no poll or analyst could predict. According to official data, the turnout was record for Chile, over 50%, equivalent to over eight million votes. It was therefore thanks to the greater turnout that the change project proposed by the young leader of the Apruebo Dignidad coalition was imposed, who at 36 years old will be the youngest president in the history of Chile on 11 March 2022. Recoleta district in Santiago de Chile, and Boric’s rival in the primaries won by the latter, declared that with “this victory we consider the chapter of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship closed”.
The results of the ballot show that Boric easily prevailed in the metropolitan region, an area that already in the first round had awarded Apruebo Dignidad, in the region of Valparaíso and, surprisingly, also in Antofagasta, a region where on 21 November in the first round the anti-political candidate Franco Parisi. Although Kast repeated his first round win in Arica and Parinacota, Tarapacá, La Araucanía, couldn’t raise the votes to win at O’Higgins and Los Ríos. Faced with the size of the defeat that was looming, the leader of the Christian Social Frente was the first to call Boric, greeting him and emphatically declaring that “from today you are the elected president of Chile and deserve all our respect”.
Subsequently, the winning candidate received a phone call from the outgoing President of the Republic Sebastián Piñera who congratulated him and invited him the same day for a meeting in the Moneda building. Then addressing the press, the outgoing president said he was convinced that Boric “will be the president of all Chileans, those who voted for him, those who voted for Kast and those who abstained”. “I hope, he concluded, that he will know how to govern with wisdom, prudence, strength, wisdom and moderation”.