There are three communes in Ñuble where the ruling party has not yet defined a single candidate for mayor on October 27: Bulnes, San Fabián and El Carmen.
In the latter, the parties and the pre-candidates themselves managed to get the central level of their parties to agree and hold non-conventional or citizen primaries in said commune, one of the three that will be held in the country, where Eduardo Riquelme (DC), Guillermo Feris (CS) and Marcelo Rubilar (PS) will compete.
The elections will be held next Sunday, June 30, at the Elise Mottart School, where voting tables will be located. The electoral roll will be the same as that used in the last plebiscite in 2023, therefore, all Carmelinos will be able to vote until the registration in December 2023. It will be an open election, that is, all citizens who are independent and militants of the ruling party will be able to vote. Something that is being defined is whether those who are militants in other groups will also be able to vote, for which a regulation will be drawn up between the calling parties.
“The parties have made an effort”
For the DC candidate, Eduardo Riquelme Quintero, who He is a public administrator and former municipal administrator of the commune, “the citizen consultation that will be held on June 30 in El Carmen is the most democratic mechanism we have today to be able to define a single candidacy for October. This is a super positive instance, because it will be the neighbors themselves who will be able to choose through this citizen consultation who they believe can represent the best in the next elections in October. So I take this opportunity to thank the parties for their efforts in agreeing to be able to generate this instance and move forward in more democracy also for the people of El Carmen.to the commune of El Carmen.”
According to Riquelme, his campaign has two main aspects. “The first is to communicate to the residents my experience in municipal management, my experience in public management. I am a public administrator by training. I worked for six years in a service dependent on the Ministry of Economy. I worked for three years as a municipal administrator. The knowledge is there, and today it is made available to the community. The second aspect is to convey that the work program that we propose addresses the main needs that residents have today. It is urgent to move forward, for example, in asphalt for our rural roads. We are one of the communities with the least asphalt in the Ñuble region and today it is enough to go around the rural areas to see that our roads are impassable. We must also move forward in rural drinking water. Today there are nearly 500 families in our community that receive drinking water in tanker trucks and it is necessary today to move forward in rural drinking water systems that give us a definitive solution for them,” he said.
“It will be an open election”
Guillermo Feris Riquelme (CS), geographer and former head of Productive Development for the municipality of Carmel, stated that “on the understanding that the official primaries of June 9 could not be held, we will be able to have unconventional primaries. We will have the possibility of having a citizen consultation this Sunday, June 30, in which the people of Carmel will be able to choose which candidate best represents the sector of the ruling party. In this case, we have three alternatives, Guillermo Feris and two very good candidates who also have merits.”
According to Feris, “this mechanism is great, it is ideal for choosing candidates. I wish both sectors had had the opportunity. But in any case, I think that since this is an open primary, because the residents have to know, the primary or the citizen consultation on June 30 will be open; all residents can vote. It is very important in this sense to promote participation, and that the candidate who is finally elected represents the feelings of many Carmelinos, not only those of us who are from the ruling party, but also other visions can be considered, which of course, are always important to integrate into a communal project.”
He added: “We have proposals that are essential for the development of this El Carmen of the new times. In this sense, I believe that asphalt and drinking water must continue to be a fundamental part of communal management, however, even though we have to put the accelerator on this type of projects, they must already be considered as a guaranteed social right.”
“A great achievement”
Marcelo Rubilar Soto (PS) is the third Carmelino to run as the sole candidate for the ruling party. With studies in the agricultural area, he has worked for the last 25 years at the San Francisco Nursing Home in the commune, and was previously elected councilor with the first majority.
“I feel very proud to lead this collective project in which many people support me and in a transversal way. I think it is important to highlight that it is a triumph of democracy not to allow an arbitrary, ‘hand-picked’ assignment from the central level in Santiago or any other place other than El Carmen. This is an important agreement that we candidates have made, and probably rarely seen, through which the Carmeline community will set an example this Sunday, June 30,” he said.
Rubilar hopes that there will be an important vote, “and that everything will develop normally, and that those who are defeated will later support the candidate who will be presented as mayor next October. Our focus will be on promoting access to rural drinking water, on road connectivity in our commune, and on strengthening the social area, especially with the elderly, along with making significant progress on works that give greater dignity to the people of Carmel in the countryside and in the urban area.”
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