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.
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