Santiago, Chile – Chileans go to the polls on Sunday to elect a new president, and for the first time in their country’s turbulent political history, the front-running candidate is a woman.
She is Dr. Michelle Bachelet, 54, a former defense minister and health minister who has become the standard-bearer of the center-left coalition of Socialists and Christian Democrats that has been in power here since Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s brutal military dictatorship ended in 1990. She is also a doctor, a former political prisoner and exile and the daughter of a prominent general who was convicted of treason, tortured and died in prison shortly after Pinochet seized power in 1973.
Recent polls show Bachelet with about 45 percent of the vote, short of the majority needed to avoid a runoff next month. Two right-wing candidates, former allies who have become bitter adversaries, are battling each other for the second spot, and polls indicate that their competition is too close to call.
“We want to win on Dec. 11 and think it is possible, but if she doesn’t do it then, we’re still going to win the second round,” said Ricardo Lagos Weber, a son of the current president and a key strategist in the Bachelet campaign. “It’s in the air that she is going to be the next president, and in the worst case, she will come into office having won two elections, not one.” Bachelet, a pediatric surgeon and divorced mother of three, has never held elective office and entered government service barely a decade ago. But she has emerged both as a symbol of Chile’s dramatic political, economic and social evolution over the past 15 years and as the personification of a new, warmer and more personal style of conducting politics here.
“I am continuity and change,” she said here Thursday in a speech closing her campaign, promising to build on the current government’s popularity and success. “Because I am a mother and doctor, I know what it means to construct something: like a home, with love, perseverance and also imagination.” Initially, this year’s election was expected to be largely a reprise of the last vote, in 1999. In that contest, the governing coalition, led by another Socialist, Ricardo Lagos, squared off against Joaquin Lavin, the candidate of an alliance of two right-wing groups, the Independent Democratic Union and National Renewal.
But those calculations had to be discarded when Sebastian Pinera, a leader of National Renewal, jumped into the race in May.
Pinera is one of the country’s most successful businessmen, with a personal fortune valued at more than $1.2 billion that includes holdings in a television network and the airline LAN Chile. His unexpected candidacy infuriated the Lavin camp and threw the race into turmoil by dividing the right.
Pinera has packaged himself – and spent more money than any of the other candidates in doing so – as a more modern and moderate alternative to Lavin, a former mayor of Santiago who came within 30,000 votes of victory in the last presidential election.
Pinera, comes from a family of Christian Democrats, and he has tried to broaden his base by wooing members of that party away from the governing coalition, though with limited success at best, according to polls.
“Pinera applauds the values of freedom, tolerance and respect, which are very important to groups in the center,” said Tomas Duval, an analyst at the Instituto Libertad, a research and advocacy group associated with Pinera’s party. “He is a humanist, not an extremist.” Lavin, in contrast, is a member of the conservative Roman Catholic group Opus Dei and has praised certain features of the Pinochet dictatorship.
Lavin is running on a platform that combines promises of “jobs, jobs and more jobs,” as he put it at his closing campaign rally here on Wednesday night, with a tough law-and-order stance that includes banishing convicts to an isolated island in the far southern, sub-antarctic reaches of the country.
Unlike Pinera, 56, an economist with a Ph.D. from Harvard, Lavin, 52, “has spent his entire career in public service, solving the real problems that real people confront,” rather than making himself rich, argued Ena von Baer Jahn, an analyst at the Freedom and Development Institute, which has links to Lavin and his party.
“His discourse is practical and not elitist, and so he appeals to all classes, even the poor.” Though Chile has had the highest sustained economic growth rate in South America since Pinochet left power and is a model of political stability, the Lavin camp minimizes those achievements.
“I will be the president of social change,” Lavin promised at his closing campaign rally, reading off a list of campaign promises from 1999 that he accused the government of not keeping.
Pinera, on the other hand, acknowledges the governing coalition’s record in office, but contends that as a businessman who built a fortune from the ground up, he is better equipped than Bachelet to lead the country.
Pinera’s campaign slogan argues that “Chile is capable of more,” while Lavin promises “wings for everyone” and Bachelet says “I am with you.” (STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS) A fourth candidate, Tomas Hirsch, is running to Bachelet’s left, leading a coalition that includes the Communist Party. He appears to have no chance of advancing to the runoff, but with polls showing him with 5 to 7 percent of the vote, he seems to have precluded even the remote possibility that the Socialist candidate might win a first-round victory.
Even some supporters of Bachelet have criticized her for supposedly conducting a lackluster campaign. In addition, there are concerns that polls may overstate her level of real support, the theory being that in a country with a tradition of machismo, some men may say they will vote for her to appear politically correct, only to vote for a man on Sunday.
“In the past, it was women who decided the election,” said Carlos Huneeus, a political analyst and director of a leading polling group here. “This time, it is going to be male voters.”