Who will the nearly five million Chileans who did not participate in elections vote for, and who will be forced to decide in the presidential elections this Sunday?

That is one of the great unknowns of the elections this November 16 in Chile, which are unprecedented for several reasons.

The center-left, which supported the government of the current president, Gabriel Boric, chose for the first time as its representative - after a primary process - a communist: Jeannette Jara.

On the other hand, the right wing is divided into three alternatives: the most traditional, represented by Evelyn Matthei; The most radical wing, under the wing of Jose Antonio Kast, and the conservative far right, embodied by libertarian congressman Johannes Kaiser.

The latest polls—before the start of the campaign blackout period—pointed to a more likely scenario: Jara and Kast facing off in a runoff on December 14.

But several analysts consulted by BBC Mundo agree that these elections have an exceptional element that makes them among the most uncertain Chile has faced in recent decades: mandatory voting.

These are the first presidential elections with mandatory voting and automatic registration of eligible voters, which will bring between five and six million new voters into the process, who will be forced to participate under penalty of fines.

Now the candidates have millions more people to convince.

But who are they and how could they influence the polls?

Why the vote

To understand where these compulsory voters come from, we have to go back several years. Within the framework of the return to democracy, the country maintained compulsory voting and voluntary registration for electoral processes.

At that time, a large number of adults registered to vote, first in the 1988 plebiscite,and then in the first democratic presidential elections after 17 years of dictatorship, held in December 1989. During the transition, however, fewer and fewer people voluntarily joined the electoral process. In 2009, in fact, 30% of the population over 18 years of age was not registered to vote, according to figures from the National Institute of Statistics (INE) and the Chilean Electoral Service (Servel). Seeking greater representativeness and with the idea of ??attracting new young voters, a constitutional reform was approved in 2012 that made voting voluntary and voter registration automatic. This expanded the voter registry to almost 13.5 million, but participation did not increase significantly. In fact, it set a record low in the 2013 presidential elections, where only 6.6 million voted in the first round and 5.5 million in the runoff. That figure increased in subsequent presidential elections, but participation remained, on average, close to 7 million. In 2022, the Chilean Congress reinstated mandatory voting, now with an expanded voter registry where all those over 18 are registered by default. Since then, the country has held four electoral processes with mandatory voting and automatic registration. In those processes, approximately 13 million voters cast their ballots.

For this Sunday's elections, the voter registry comprises 15.6 million people, so experts estimate that between 5 and 6 million Chileans will be required to vote for the first time in a presidential election.

Congress approved that for these elections, those who fail to fulfill their voting duty will be fined between 0.5 and 1.5 monthly tax units (UTM), equivalent to between 34,600 and 103,900 Chilean pesos, or approximately between $36 and $107 USD.

Who are they and what do they think?

Because of the magnitude of the change they represent—analyst Pepe Auth has called them a Copernican shift in the Chilean electoral system—experts and politicians from all sectors have attempted to study the behavior of these voters.

The most frequently repeated observation is who are unpredictable, who are not interested in politics, and who, therefore, do not have a fixed ideological identification.

Juan Pablo Lavin, from the Citizen Panel Survey of the Universidad del Desarrollo (UDD), has been tracking this voter for years and, therefore, has been able to trace some of their characteristics over time.

In conversation with BBC Mundo, he explains that these new voters are proportionally more men than women, younger than adults,and of lower rather than higher socioeconomic profiles; from the lower-middle and lower classes.

He also points out that they would be more concentrated in the regions and on the outskirts than in the country's urban centers.

Regarding their approach to previous electoral processes, Lavin emphasizes that these are people who have a high level of distrust in institutions, but above all, in those who hold power at the time of the elections.

“They have a very strong opposition to those in power. This makes sense given the idea that politics is useless, and that's why they voluntarily chose not to participate. For some it's indifference, for others frustration, for others anger,” Lavin maintains.

According to the numbers from the UDD Citizen Panel, this was evident in the constitutional plebiscite of September 4, 2022, where the majority of Chileans voted against the proposal for a new Constitution.

“8 out of 10 voters Those forced to vote rejected the constitutional proposal. According to our numbers, if they hadn't participated, the text could have been perfectly approved,” says Lavin. Tomas Duval, an analyst with a master's degree in political science and an academic at the Autonomous University of Chile, adds that among forced voters, “there isn't the same consistency more common in a politically engaged voter who votes left and will always vote left. Here, this group of people might vote right in one election and left in the next.” This, he says, was evident in the 2024 regional governor elections, which had a runoff. “When you compared the votes from the first and second rounds, you saw that in polling stations where a Republican (right-wing) candidate won first, the Broad Front (left-wing) candidate won in the second round.” “So they lack ideological coherence and consistency, which makes them quite challenging for candidates and makes this a very uncertain election.” He emphasizes. According to various analysts, this forced voter also has significant concerns about issues such as insecurity due to the increase in violent crimes and the presence of criminal groups like the Tren de Aragua. Another issue that captures their attention is immigration. One element that generally characterizes this voter is a sense of pessimism about the future. Lavin asserts that they also have little patience when it comes to fulfilling promises. “They value democratic processes, consensus, and dialogue much less. They are tired of that kind of thing. They want change now.”

How can they affect the election?

And now come the questions that have most occupied candidates and analysts in these months of campaigning: how to capture them and who they might favor in the elections.

Before getting into the analysis, it's important to say that no one can predict how they will act at the polls.

But some movements or trends can be discerned.

What campaign teams and experts are reading is that this group of people would tend to favor outsider and more hardline discourses on security and migration.

But also those who are better known and have emerged as the opposition to the current government.

Therefore, the analysts' initial intuition is that these voters might prefer right-wing candidates to left-wing ones.

“Those of us who follow voters over time see that they are the ones who change their preferences the most, but they do so among the opposition. The movement to cross over or return to (Jeannette) Jara is very infrequent. There are still 8 out of 10 who vote against the continuation of (Gabriel) Boric's government,” says Lavin.

In that sense, alternatives like the populist Franco Parisi or the libertarian Johannes Kaiser could benefit.

Parisi has based his entire campaign on the idea that the system is broken, but that he knows how to make ordinary people benefit from it as well. And Kaiser has taken up the culture war on issues like family and abortion, but has also hardened his rhetoric on immigration and security.

Despite the above, Lavin maintains that—according to his data—the obligated voter still recognizes Jose Antonio Kast as the antithesis of those currently in power.

The founder of the Republican Party was precisely the one who competed against Boric in the last presidential runoff. Therefore, among people who are neither interested in nor follow politics, Kast could emerge as the most well-known antithesis to the continuation of his government.

Duval maintains that the obligated voter is only now beginning to worry about this Sunday's elections. And that the days leading up to the elections will be crucial in defining those votes.

The analyst also states that, in general, the obligated voter distrusts traditional media and gets its information primarily through social networks.

In the final stretch before the elections, the candidates seem to be appealing—in part—to this world with controversial communication strategies, as Kast himself did at a campaign closing rally speaking from behind a bulletproof glass screen; Evelyn Matthei by releasing a controversial video in which she aimed to differentiate herself from her rivals; or Kaiser himself, who reiterated that,If he becomes president of Chile, he will pardon those convicted of human rights violations.

All of this aims to appeal to the most committed right-wing voters, but also to some of those millions who were not previously interested in elections and who will now be forced to choose a candidate.

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