Chile heads to a presidential run-off between Jara and Kast

Chileans face perhaps the starkest choice in the history of their country’s young democracy when they vote next month in a presidential runoff that pits hard-right José Antonio Kast against communist Jeannette Jara.

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Neither candidate cleared the 50% threshold to win, but Kast heads into the second round best positioned to succeed after an unprecedented 70% of voters backed an array of right-wing parties in Sunday's poll.

An ultraconservative lawyer who vows to deport Chile's estimated 300,000 immigrants without legal status and speaks nostalgically of Chile's brutal dictatorship, Kast on Sunday told supporters that his Dec. 14 race against Jara was a choice between “two models of society” — chaos and order, stagnation and progress, left and right.

That choice is especially fraught for Chile's 1.5 million immigrants — in particular, the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who escaped the repressive socialist government of President Nicolas Maduro to make this sliver of a country their home.

Many of those immigrants, lacking residency of five years or more, are not eligible to vote in Chilean elections.