"Chilean right-wing presidential candidate Jose Antonio Kast presented on Monday a plan to reform public employment and combat cronyism within the government. During a press conference in Santiago, he stated that citizen services are inefficient and criticised the increase in public employees in recent years. "Today, the State does not properly fulfil the function that citizens, the residents of each municipality, are expecting. And they see how the number of people working in the State increases, how plans and programs expand, but that does not always match the quality of the service these people receive," he said. Kast, who trails Communist candidate Jeannette Jara in recent polls, said that if elected president, he would cut the number of public employees to reduce what he described as an inflated state workforce of more than one million. "From 2014 to date, it has only gone up, and we now have about 1,200,000 people who depend in one way or another on some form of State remuneration," he stated. He told the press that he plans to identify employees "in positions they shouldn’t occupy" by establishing a "unified registry of public servants." Kast, 59, is the Republican Party's presidential candidate and is running for a second time after losing the previous election to Gabriel Boric. The first round of the presidential elections will be held on November 16, and if no candidate surpasses 50 per cent of the votes, the two candidates with the highest vote counts will face each other in a runoff on December 14."