By Alexander Villegas and Fabian Cambero
SANTIAGO (Reuters) -Chileans are voting in a presidential election on Sunday that's pitting the governing leftist coalition against an array of right-wing candidates and will also redefine the country's legislature.
There are eight candidates in the race and none are expected to get the 50% plus one vote needed to win the election outright, likely triggering a run-off between the top two candidates on December 14.
Chilean law bans opinion polls 15 days before elections but the last numbers showed Jeannette Jara, the governing coalition candidate from the Communist Party, in the lead, with far-right Jose Antonio Kast, from the Republican Party, in second.
Experienced moderate-right politician Evelyn Matthei, a former mayor and senator, led early polls but dipped in recent months and has been trading third place with libertarian firebrand Johannes Kaiser from the National Libertarian Party.
Polling stations around Santiago, mostly at schools, filled with orderly lines of voters in the morning hours.
First-time voter Samanta Paredes, 30, in Santiago's historic downtown, said she hoped voting would proceed calmly and create a middle-road path for Chile.
"I hope a more centered person wins, that the extremes don't win, because they're never good for anyone," she said.
Law graduate German Rojas, 33, also said he hoped the election could create a spirit of unity, rather than polarization.
"I'm not clear if one option or another has a better chance. But I hope that whoever wins has the capacity that Chile needs."
Polls are expected to close at 6 p.m. (2100 GMT), but will remain open if there are still voting lines. Initial results are expected quickly with a full count within hours.
Crime and immigration have dominated the electoral agenda, a far cry from the wave of left-wing optimism and hopes of drafting a new constitution that brought current President Gabriel Boric, who isn't allowed to run for reelection, to power.
Even as they left their local polling stations on Sunday, candidates nodded to pledges to fight crime.
"People who would like to go out to see friends or go to the movies don't dare to because of crime. We have too much to do," Matthei told reporters.
Another shift from the previous election is a mandatory vote for the 15.7 million registered voters. The previous election saw an abstention rate of 53% in the first-round vote and the large amount of apathetic or undecided residents set to cast ballots adds a wild card to the race.
"It's an unprecedented scenario we haven't lived through and it's playing out in a presidential election," said Guillermo Holzmann, a political analyst from the University of Valparaiso, who added the vote would be very difficult to predict, adding that polls in Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador failed to predict recent results.
"(New voters) don't think in terms of left, right or center, they think in terms of what changes are needed and what will benefit them," he said.
Most of Congress is also up for grabs, with the entirety of the 155-member lower house and 23 of the country's 50 Senate seats in contention.
The governing leftist coalition currently has a minority in both chambers and right-wing majorities in both could set the stage for Congress and the presidency to be controlled by the right for the first time since the end of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship in 1990.
(Reporting by Alexander Villegas and Fabian Cambero, additional reporting by Daina Beth Solomon; Editing by Alistair Bell and Andrew Heavens)
