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A man cast his vote before the polls closed during the second day of the Constitutional Convention election to select assembly members that will draft a new constitution, in Santiago, Chile, Sunday, May 16, 2021
CHILEAN communists were among the big winners in elections to the country’s constitutional convention, taking 28 seats as the left scored a major victory in Sunday’s election.
Their success came as the centre-left Apruebo list won 24 of the 155 seats in the convention, with the right-wing Vamos por Chile list taking just 36 seats — less than a quarter of the total.
While it received the highest total number of votes (762,282), Vamos por Chile hoped to win at least a third of the seats in order to block significant changes to be included in the new constitution.
Far-right forces are rising across Latin America and the Caribbean, armed with a common agenda of anti-communism, the culture war, and neoliberal economics, writes VIJAY PRASHAD
Communist Party presidential candidate JEANNETTE JARA challenges the Chilean left to stop talking only among comrades and reach out to angry voters abandoned by politics in the race against the far right this November
For the first time in years, the dominant voice within Chile’s official left comes not from neoliberal centrists but from the world of labour, writes LEONEL POBLETE CODUTTI