The mayor of Providencia, Evelyn Matthei, expressed her intention to compete for the presidential armchair of La Moneda as champion by Chile Vamos, in an open challenge to Joaquín Lavín (UDI), the right-most-placed candidate for next year’s elections.
“Yes, I’m running for president,” said Matthei, who lost the 2013 presidential election to Michelle Bachelet, in an interview he gave to The Latest News.
“I would love to be a candidate here in Providence again, but what I’m proposing is to start discussing the ideas in the background. There are a number of proposals I want to make public on education, health, corruption, security, equal opportunities, among others,” he said.
Matthei added that “I think the first thing is to build a program and then see the person who is best positioned. I am absolutely available to be a presidential candidate,” though she acknowledged that UDI President Jacqueline van Rysselberghe still does not know her intentions.
The former labour minister acknowledged that in her decision to return to competition for the Presidency, she influenced Joaquín Lavín’s last statement, where she defined he was defined as “social democrat.”
“Sunday’s definition was the last after a string of similar situations (…) Clearly, (Lavín) left the President (Sebastián Piñera) on a tightrope with the middle class project. Actually, I don’t want to make a list of Lavin’s mistakes,” he warned.
However, she explained that “I am convinced that in politics you have to play as a team and suddenly I felt that a political project was being discussed without having talked about anything before and on the basis of a candidate’s personality. I think that can be very dangerous (…) The last time I saw the effects of such candidates without political project was in the previous government (by Michelle Bachelet). The candidate managed to bring together from the Communist Party to the Christian Democracy, but not around the project. They were joined by the person and we saw the results.”
