A BILLIONAIRE investor has made history by becoming the first right-wing candidate to win a presidential election in Chile in more than half a century. Sebastián Piñera returned the country’s conservatives to power for the first time since the ousting of dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1990.
In a close finish, Mr Piñera won 51.61 per cent of the vote in a second round run-off, beating former president Eduardo Frei by just over 3 per cent to end 20 years of centre-left rule by the Concertación coalition, which had overseen the country’s transition back to democracy.
At his victory rally, Mr Piñera said the country’s democratic system “has taken a new and great step, demonstrating its solidity, its maturity and, after 20 years of Concertación government has given us the marvellous responsibility and challenge of conducting the destiny of the country”.
Mr Frei quickly conceded defeat and went personally to congratulate Mr Piñera at the Santiago hotel where he had awaited the outcome of the race.
With the result, Chilean voters have broken a decade-long streak of victories by left-wing and populists leaders in South American politics.
Mr Piñera (60), who made his fortune by introducing credit cards to Chile in the 1970s, controls a television network and has large stakes in the country’s biggest airline and its most popular football club.
He does not advocate a major change of direction for a country that has won plaudits for its economic performance in recent decades as well as social programmes that have cut poverty from a third to just over 10 per cent of the population.
Mr Piñera promises to create one million new jobs in his four years in office and to restore Chile’s declining competitiveness.
More controversially, he wants to liberalise the country’s labour laws and advocates the partial privatisation of the state-run copper company, which owns the world’s biggest copper mine and is Chile’s biggest export earner.
While the parties that backed Mr Piñera hope his victory at the polls will finally free them from the legacy of their support for the Pinochet regime, the new president will still have to handle delicately what remains a raw nerve in Chilean political life.
After his victory rally on Sunday night, some of his supporters chanted the dead dictator’s name.
Mr Piñera – whose brother served as a minister during the military regime – has said that he will give jobs to former Pinochet officials, so long as they were not involved in human rights abuses.
This could create tensions at a time when cases against human rights abusers continue to make their way through the country’s courts, where prosecutors are determined to hold military and police officials to account for the murder and disappearance of more than 3,000 opponents, including Mr Frei’s father, himself a former president.
In his concession speech, Mr Frei called for the Concertación to maintain its unity in opposition where it now must seek to repair internal divisions that severely hampered his campaign.
The former president praised the achievements of the Concertación’s two decades in power which have seen Chile become South America’s richest society and the first country from the continent to join the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
“Chile is much better than the country we received in 1990,” he told glum supporters.