“He is anything but conservative, and to liken him to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi because they both own television stations – Mr. Piñera has promised to turn his over to a foundation – is also quite wrong” (written by Jorge Heine).

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Chile is by no means the most significant of Latin American countries. But it has been a harbinger of things to come in the region, a sort of California of South America. Thus, the results of the Jan. 17 presidential election runoff made news around the world. For one, they signalled the end of the 20-year rule of the Concertacion, the centre-left coalition that has ruled Chile since 1990. It also marked the first time in half a century that Chile’s right has won a national election. With most of South America having turned left, many commentators have seen this, quite wrongly, as a sign of a regional swing to the right.

A standard headline reporting Sebastian Piñera’s election said “Conservative billionaire elected president of Chile.” The reference to his wealth is true enough. His self-made personal fortune is estimated between $1.5-billion and $2-billion (U.S.), putting him somewhere around 700th in Forbes’s world billionaires list and among Chile’s top five, and it has been growing by the day – as of last week, his stock in LAN Airlines, which he has promised to sell before taking office on March 11, had risen close to $400-million in value since June, 2009.

But he is anything but conservative, and to liken him to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi because they both own television stations – Mr. Piñera has promised to turn his over to a foundation – is also quite wrong.

Always at the top of his class, he is a Harvard economics PhD, a former international civil servant whose first job straight out of Harvard was at the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (often described as Latin America’s think tank), a professor at his alma mater(the Catholic University of Chile), the man who brought credit cards to Chile in the late 1970s, and the pilot of his own helicopter.

Mr. Piñera is above all an overachiever. For the campaign, he bought a state-of-the-art printing machine, set it up in a former factory and produced all the campaign material he needed himself. His fine-grained polling, taken from a study done by the retail industry, allowed him to identify exactly what Chile’s aspirational, newly emerging middle-class sectors want – and then beat a coalition deemed unbeatable.

Born and raised in a Christian Democratic family, Mr. Piñera was an opponent of Augusto Pinochet, and voted against the general in the 1988 plebiscite that brought an end to military rule. He then threw in his lot with a right-wing party, Renovacion Nacional, was elected to the Senate in 1989,

and has made several runs for the presidency. He had many run-ins with the Independent Democrat Union, the other right-wing party in his coalition (and keepers of the military regime’s flame) because he is a liberal on social issues. His campaign ads famously featured a gay couple, much to the chagrin

of conservatives. He has promised to strengthen the state and to keep Chile’s social safety network, much improved under Socialist President Michelle Bachelet.

His main promise has been to create one million jobs, 250,000 a year, by raising Chile’s growth rate to 6 per cent. At an average of 5 per cent a year, the latter has been the highest of any country outside Asia since 1990, but has slowed lately. He has also vowed to increase productivity, and to make Chile the first developed country in Latin America within a decade, a homage to the country’s 2010 bicentennial.

Chile has done very well in the past 20 years. It has a $15,000 per capita income in purchasing power parity terms, and an FDI-stock-to-GDP rate of 65 per cent, among the highest in the world. Canadian banks and mining companies have thrived there, in part because of its corporate tax rate of 17 per cent. Poverty was reduced from 38 per cent in 1990 to 13.7 per cent in 2006. Just a few days ago, it became the first South American country to join the OECD.

Most people still find it hard to believe that a coalition whose sitting president, Ms. Bachelet, enjoys 80-per-cent approval ratings has lost this election. I did not support or vote for Mr. Piñera, but I have the feeling that if he can restrain his business instincts to continue to increase his personal fortune, and applies his legendary energy (he is known as “the locomotive”) and managerial know-how to further unleash Chile’s booming economy, he and the country can do very well.

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Jorge Heine, a Chilean, is a distinguished fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and a professor of political science at Wilfrid Laurier University. His latest book (with Andrew F. Cooper) is Which Way Latin America? Hemispheric Politics meets Globalization.

“In this year’s election, ‘dissenters’ are in a strong position to challenge the predictable dynamics that the Chilean party system has followed since the country returned to civilian rule” (written by Carlos Salas Lind).

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In 2008, after the polls repeatedly showed the center-right opposition candidate gaining ground ahead of this year’s presidential election, very few political leaders in the Concertación (Chile’s center-left governing coalition), seemed interested in standing up to a venturous challenge.

Probably the fear of becoming the first candidate for the Concertación to suffer a defeat in the post Pinochet-era was making it hard to find a serious contender to further postpone the opposition’s (long) wait for alternation in power.

Among senior experts for the government, the dominant view appeared to be that if a right- leaning candidate was ahead in the polls, then a rather conservative center-left coalition candidate would more likely erase that lead.

Consequently, former Chilean President Eduardo Frei, a member of the Christian Democratic Party, emerged as the best card to neutralize the opposition candidate’s gains. The move looked to boost the morale of those who considered the task of winning a fifth term in office insurmountable.

Nevertheless, this optimistic assumption proved wrong, and an incipient revolt brewing among less prominent figures within the governing coalition finally broke out.

Mr. Enríquez-Ominami, the son of a hardliner of a socialist revolutionary movement in the 60’s, stepped forward to fill the void left by those who chose to play down the call for renewal. During the last three months, Mr. Ominami’s popularity has soared as high as 20% leaving many supporters of the Concertación in disarray(1).

Indeed, not only has Mr. Frei seen his base of electoral support shrinking to very threatening levels, but the center-right candidate’s chances of winning in the first round election have also faded away.

The fact that a young and inexperienced Member of Parliament can be in position to seriously alter the dynamics of Chile’s electoral competition reveals more about the state of the Chilean democratic process than the candidates themselves.

20 years after Pinochet was compelled to allow his opponents to lead the transition to democracy, civil engagement in the political process and faith in political institutions are in bad shape (2).

Call for renewal of the political elite has never been absent within the two political blocks that monopolize the country’s electoral competition. However, in this year’s election ‘dissenters’ seem to be in a strong position to challenge the predictable dynamics that the Chilean party system has followed since the country returned to civilian rule.

Even though Mr. Ominami also poses a threat to the center-right opposition candidate; Sebastian Piñera, it is Mr. Frei who faces the toughest test in the first round of the presidential elections. Conceding a humiliating defeat on December 13 can seriously jeopardize the existence of the broad party alliance that put a period to the continuation of Pinochet’s regime.

Despite the sagging poll numbers, Mr Frei’s competent strategists have not been able to reinvent his image. Frustration has also contributed to switching the campaign into negative attacks which are proving to be the wrong recipe to revitalize the plummeting confidence among the supporters of the Concertación.

In fact, it is turning out to be a colossal challenge to convince Chileans that a series of ‘unfulfilled’ social demands will surely be addressed in a fifth term of office.
This ‘doubtful’ promise certainly does not strengthen Mr. Frei’s ability to attract electors that are both tired of waiting and hungry for change.

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(1) Some of the latest polls show Mr. Frei’s margin over Ominami within a range of just 2% to 5 %.

(2) One of the most peculiar inheritances of Pinochet’s regime is Chile’s binominal electoral system. Under the binominal system, parties or coalitions are only allowed to present a list with two candidates per district. Forcing parties to fuse in order to secure at least one of the two seats has resulted in limited political competition and the exclusion of minorities.