A billionaire who started his fortune by providing credit cards to Chileans has brought the right wing closer than it has ever been to the presidency since democracy was restored 19 years ago.
But the key to victory may be a rebellious young socialist with a growing following among voters hungry for change.
Sebastian Pinera, whose many investments include Chile’s main airline, most popular football team and a leading TV channel, has been appealing to centrist voters and leading the polls ever since he began his third run at the presidency. He now has an outside chance at a first-round victory yesterday against three different candidates.
PHOTO: REUTERS
A win by Pinera, 60, would mark a tilt to the right in a region dominated by leftists, and a real break from the governing center-left coalition that has held onto power since the end of General Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 to 1990 dictatorship.
“The time of the Concertacion has passed,’’ Pinera declared in his closing campaign speech, referring to the coalition. “It is used up, it has run out of material, lost its way, its force, its desire, and is unified only by how it is stuck in the past.’’ But when Latin American leftists manage to present a unified front — as they have in Uruguay and Bolivia in the past two weeks — they have shown they can defeat candidates whose core voters are wealthy elites.
Whether that happens in Chile depends in large part on Representative Marco Enriquez-Ominami, the 36-year old better known as MEO, whose charisma and energy have fired up a new generation of voters who have grown tired of traditional politicians.
About 44 percent of likely voters favored Pinera in the last major poll published before the vote, compared to 31 percent for former president Eduardo Frei, 18 percent for independent Enriquez-Ominami and 7 percent for communist Jorge Arrate. The survey by the Center for the Study of Contemporary Reality had an error margin of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
If Pinera and Frei face each other in the Jan. 17 runoff, the ruling coalition can remain in power only by capturing the votes that would have gone to MEO. And while Arrate has already pledged to support Frei in exchange for communist seats in Congress, MEO has shown zero interest in making a deal.
Chile’s strong economy, negligible inflation and stable democracy are the envy of Latin America. But both MEO and Pinera have tapped into a strong sentiment that Chile can provide much more for its citizens.
“We need a modern political system, renewed to fit these new times,’’ MEO said in an interview. “Today the Concertacion represents a worn out group of politicians, from a tired past, reactive rather than proactive. This situation of running out of ideas, of few decisions for confronting poverty and problems in education, pushed me to propose an alternative.”
Frei, himself the son of a Chilean president, already governed Chile from 1994 to 2000, and while his latest campaign has swung to the left politically, he has failed to gain anywhere near the 78 percent approval ratings enjoyed by outgoing Chilean President Michelle Bachelet. Also, at 67, Frei can’t help but represent the old guard.
So the big question is, will MEO’s voters keep supporting the center-left coalition, even with Frei at the helm? Or will their desire for change be so strong that they vote for Pinera, whose alliance of right-wing parties provided a show of democracy during the last decade of Pinochet’s dictatorship?
Pinera, ranked No. 701 with US$1 billion on the Forbes magazine world’s richest list, is a Harvard University economist and the most moderate candidate Chile’s right has ever had.
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