Sebastian Pinera, a billionaire with investments in Chile’s main airline, most popular soccer team and a leading TV channel, heads into Sunday’s presidential election with a good chance of returning the right wing to power for the first time since democracy was restored 19 years ago.
Opinion polls put Pinera far ahead of Eduardo Frei, a former president who represents the fraying center-left coalition that has governed Chile since General Augusto Pinochet ended his dictatorship. A victory by Pinera would mark a tilt to the right in a region dominated by leftist governments.
The 60-year-old businessman is expected to keep the fiscally prudent policies of the ruling coalition as he focuses on fighting corruption and bringing new faces to government.
Outgoing President Michelle Bachelet has sky-high 78 percent approval ratings, but the left couldn’t agree on fewer than three candidates, none of whom has close to her popularity. Pinera has also made a point of appealing to centrists.
“Pinera is the most moderate candidate that the right has ever had,” said Patricio Navia, a Chilean political analyst who teaches at New York University.
The elections are unlikely to produce radical changes in Chile, an economically stable copper producer.
“The big surprise of this election is that all the candidates are proposing very similar policies,” Navia said.
Pinera lost to Bachelet in 2006, but has topped all polls since beginning his third campaign for president last year. The latest survey, published on Wednesday, had him falling short of a first-round victory, with 44 percent of the vote to 31 percent for Frei.
Marco Enriquez-Ominami, a congressman who broke with the socialists after realizing that primary rules favored Frei, would get 18 percent and leftist Jorge Arrate would get 7 percent, a poll by the Center for the Study of Contemporary Reality showed. The poll had an error margin of plus or minus three percentage points.
Despite those numbers, trends suggest a first-round win for Pinera can’t be ruled out, center director Carlos Huneeus said, concluding that “the right is in a better position than ever” to reach the presidency.
It remains to be seen whether Chile’s leftist coalition could regroup ahead of a second-round vote on Jan. 17, but polls indicate Pinera would win then as well — with 49 percent to 32 percent for Frei, and a slightly tighter margin of 47 percent to 35 percent against Enriquez-Ominami.
The center polled 1,200 people nationwide between Nov. 24 and last Saturday.
“We are going to win by a wide margin,” Pinera predicted as he prepared for a campaign-closing rally in the capital yesterday.
The other three candidates planned to close their campaigns elsewhere in Chile. Arrate proposed last month that the three leftists form a common front to defeat Pinera in the second round, but the others were cool to the idea.
Chile has never elected a billionaire before.
While the extent of his wealth has not been made public, Forbes magazine ranks Pinera at No. 701 on its world’s richest list, with US$1 billion. While he has put some US$500 million in Chilean investments in blind trusts, he still has many more investments outside the country.
Pinera is running for the Alliance for Change, comprised of the far-right Independent Democratic Union and the right-wing National Renovation party, which provided a sheen of democracy for Pinochet during the final decade of his dictatorship.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
RSS