Chile's former President Michelle Bachelet zeroes in on second term with decisive first-round win.

AutorWitte-Lebhar, Benjamin

Opposition candidate and former President Michelle Bachelet (2006-2010) cruised to victory in Chile's Nov. 17 first-round presidential election, scooping up nearly twice as many votes as her closest rival, Evelyn Matthei of the governing Alianza coalition, and sending the rest of the crowded field packing.

Bachelet, leader of the center-left Nueva Mayoria coalition, won nearly 47% of the vote, well ahead of Matthei (25%) but short of the 50% mark needed to win the presidency outright. "We knew the challenge of winning in just one round would be complicated. We gave it our all and came very close to doing it," she told reporters following the Nov. 17 vote.

Third place went to Marco Enriquez-Ominami (10.98%), a progressive former deputy who, despite poll predictions to the contrary, finished narrowly ahead of independent economist Franco Parisi (10.11%). Enriquez-Ominami, just 36 at the time, also finished third in the 2009 first-round presidential election (NotiSur, Dec. 18, 2009). The other five candidates participating in Sunday's contest--Marcel Claude, Alfredo Sfeir, Roxana Miranda, Ricardo Israel, and Tomas Jocelyn-Holt--together netted just over 7% of the vote.

Bachelet, a divorcee and self-proclaimed agnostic, made history eight years ago when she beat current President Sebastian Pinera to become Chile's first female head of state (NotiSur, Jan. 20, 2006). She had been hoping to make history again by becoming the first presidential candidate since Eduardo Frei, in 1993, to win election in just a single round. The popular ex-president failed in that bid--mostly because of the record number of participants in the contest--but is still the odds-on favorite to win come Dec. 15, when she and Matthei go head-to-head in the second-round runoff.

A victory over Matthei would make Bachelet the first post-dictatorship president to earn a second term in office. Bachelet's popular predecessor, President Ricardo Lagos (2000-2006), contemplated a second run for office but--for reasons never made public--eventually opted against it. Ex-President Frei (1994-2000) tried but failed to win his old job back in the last election, losing to Pinera in a 2010 runoff (NotiSur, Jan. 22, 2010). Chilean presidents are allowed to serve multiple terms but barred from seeking immediate reelection.

Shuffling the deck

Bachelet, a member of the Partido Socialista (PS), left office in early 2010 with an 80% approval rating. For the next couple of years, however, she...

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