Chile's Presidential Race Heads to Wide-Open Final Round.
| Autor | Witte-Lebhar, Benjamin |
Billionaire businessman and former head of state Sebastian Pinera (2010-2014) took the opening round of Chile's crowded presidential election, but not by the slam-dunk margin many pundits predicted. The result sets the stage for a wide-open runoff on Dec. 17 against second-place finisher Alejandro Guillier. An independent senator and former television newscaster, Guillier is a relative newcomer to the political world, but he has a chance, nevertheless, to upset the more experienced conservative--provided he can unite the divided left.
The placement of the candidates played out more or less as predicted, with Pinera (36.6%), Guillier (22.7%), and journalist Beatriz Sanchez (20.3%) of the upstart leftist coalition Frente Amplio (Broad Front, FA) securing the top three spots in the Nov. 19 contest. But the vote percentages the candidates received varied significantly from pre-election poll numbers and challenge the notion that Pinera is a "prohibitive favorite," as a recent Los Angeles Times article described him.
Analysts suggested for months that a 40% vote haul in the first round would give Pinera enough of a cushion to make victory in next month's runoff highly probable, and most pollsters predicted he would reach that magic number. The Centro de Estudios Publicos (Center of Public Studies, CEP), Chile's most prestigious polling firm, projected Pinera's first-round finish at 44%, as did the final CERC-MORI poll (Centro de Estudios de la Realidad Contemporanea/Market & Opinion Research International). Another research firm, CADEM, put the number even higher, at 45%.
The actual result for Pinera was well below those projections. The opposite was true for the FA's Sanchez. The CEP expected her to win just 8% of the vote. Instead she took more than a fifth of all votes and came close to sneaking past Guillier for a chance to face Pinera directly in the second round, according to the Servicio Electoral de Chile (SERVEL), the country's electoral authority. The discrepancy prompted some feisty remarks from the FA candidate in her post-election speech in Santiago, the Chilean capital.
"Where is this oracle, the CEP, erasing us from the map? Where are the other polls that said we didn't have a chance?" Sanchez asked. "They said we were out of it. But that was false. We were in it!"
The leading pollsters also missed the mark on fourth-place finisher Jose Antonio Kast, a conservative congressman and former member of the hard-right Union Democrata...
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