HOW CHILE WILL OVERCOME GLOBAL CRISIS: FROM PINERA TO PINERA. (Come il Cile supererà la crisi globale: da Pinera a Pinera)

Chilean billionaire Sebastian Pinera may emerge as the leader in the first round of the country’s presidential election today without garnering enough votes to avoid a second-round run-off in January, polls show.

The former investment banker leads the ruling coalition’s Eduardo Frei and 36-year-old lawmaker Marco Enriquez-Ominami by more than 10 percentage points. The top two finishers in today’s ballot will take part in a runoff election Jan. 17.

“All the polls are very clear: Pinera will come first and Frei will probably come second,” said Robert Funk, director of the public affairs institute at the University of Chile in Santiago. “On Monday we start again from zero. It will become a new campaign.”

Today’s poll results may make it easier to predict whether Pinera, 60, will win the runoff election and end 20 years of rule by the coalition that unseated dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1988. Should he win more than 45 percent of the vote, Pinera will be the likely winner in January, while anything less than 43 percent means he may struggle in the second round, Funk said.

Pinera will probably win 44 percent of votes cast, while Frei will get 31 percent and Enriquez-Ominami will get 18 percent, according to a December poll by the Santiago-based Center for the Study of Contemporary Reality. The survey of 1,200 people has a margin of error of 3 percentage points.

As president, Pinera would seek to steer Latin America’s most stable economy toward more of the free-market policies favored by the regime that overthrew socialist Salvador Allende in 1973. The coalition of Socialists and Christian Democrats known as the Concertacion has run Chile since democracy was restored in 1990, longer than any democratic movement currently governing in Latin America.

“Concertacion supporters will obviously be disappointed but they can also rationalize it by saying it’s time for a change after 20 years,” said Susan Purcell, director of the Center for Hemispheric Policy at the University of Miami.

Frei, 67, is campaigning on a pledge for “continuity and change,” he said in a July 24 speech in southern Chile. He’s promised to keep the country on the Concertacion’s well-worn path and extend social security programs to the middle class.

Enriquez-Ominami is the biological son of a leftist guerrilla leader who died in a gunfight with Pinochet’s security forces. He quit the Socialist Party to protest Frei’s nomination and has sapped supporters from both Frei and Pinera, calling for constitutional reform, legalizing abortion and gay marriage.

The coalition has held on to power by preserving Pinochet’s economic legacy of balanced budgets, privatized pensions [the reform introduced by then-Secretary of Labor and Social Security, José Piñera; entry of mine] and low tariffs, while slashing poverty to 14 percent from 39 percent between 1990 and 2006, according to government data.

“We’re choosing between economically prudent policies from the Concertacion and economically prudent, but slightly more liberal, pro-market policies from Pinera,” said Benito Berber, an economist at RBS Securities Inc. in Stamford, Connecticut.

Chileans will also be voting to fill 18 of 38 places in the Senate and all 120 seats in the lower house of Chile’s Congress.

Pinera, who Forbes magazine says has $1 billion, has promised to sell his stake in Santiago-based Lan Airlines SA and put other holdings in blind trusts if he is elected.

President Michelle Bachelet is the Concertacion’s most popular leader ever with an 83 percent approval rating in October, according a poll by the Center for Public Studies in Santiago, a business-sponsored research group. The poll of 1,505 people has a margin of error of 3 percentage points.

Bachelet sustained her popularity amid the world’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depression because she was able to tap about $20 billion of savings she had refused to spend during the preceding copper boom. She used the money to pay for tax cuts, cash handouts and investment in infrastructure during the 2009 recession.

Frei, president from 1994 to 2000, left office with an approval rating of 28 percent, the lowest of any Concertacion president, according to the Center for Public Studies.

“This election is about Chile trying to change from post- dictatorship politics to a Chile of normal politics,” Funk said. “It is the end of an era.”

(Bloomberg)