Bachelet leads in Chile elections, but will face runoff

Boosted by the promise of educational and constitutional reforms, Michelle Bachelet easily out-polled eight other candidates Sunday in Chile’s presidential elections, but the country's former president fell short of the majority needed to avoid a runoff election.

With nearly all of the votes counted, Bachelet, a former pediatrician and president of Chile from 2006 to 2010, garnered 46 percent of the vote. She will face the conservative ruling party candidate Evelyn Matthei in a second round of voting on Dec. 15.

“The country has voted for the proposals we have made, so that once and for all Chile becomes the modern, caring and just country that we all want,” said Bachelet in front of hundreds of supporters gathered at the Plaza San Francisco Hotel in Santiago. “We knew that winning in the first round would be difficult and we made a huge effort considering the amount of candidates and the challenge of voluntary voting.”

The year’s elections marked a new cycle in Chilean politics. Spurred by massive protests in recent years, the presidential campaign centered on profound changes to Chile’s political system.

Bachelet made education reform a pillar of her campaign. She promised free higher education to all students within six years. She would pay for school reform by increasing corporate taxes from 20 percent to 25 percent. Bachelet also campaigned heavily to reform the constitution drafted by former dictator Augusto Pinochet.

But reforms will not come easily for Bachelet’s New Majority coalition. With 99 percent of the votes counted, the left-wing coalition had 51 percent voting majority in the Senate and 48 percent in the lower chamber, short of the percentages needed to secure super-majorities.

Chileans recently marked the 40^th anniversary of the Pinochet-led coup that toppled former socialist president Salvador Allende. And the ingrained memories of Pinochet’s dictatorship may have hurt Matthei’s campaign. In a 1988 plebiscite, she voted to keep Pinochet in power, a move that was recently criticized by current Chilean President Sebastián Piñera, the billionaire businessman who voted against Pinochet. Pinochet lost the vote and Chileans voted for a democratically elected government in 1990.

While growing up in the 1950s, Bachelet and Matthei were neighbors and played together on the military base where both of their father's were stationed. But after the coup that installed Pinochet, Matthei's father rose through the ranks of the government, while Bachelet's father, who had been allied with the overthrown government of Salvador Allende, was imprisoned and tortured.

Bachelet's father, Antonio, died of heart failure in 1974. An investigation linked his death, at age 51, to the torture he had endured.

Matthei, who served as Piñera’s labor minister, was unable to capitalize on what, by most accounts, has been a successful Piñera presidency. The Chilean economy grew an average of 5.5 annually under Piñera’s reign. And the unemployment rate, which dropped from 10 percent to 5.7 percent in the last four years, is the envy of Latin America.

But wealth in the country of 17 million people remains concentrated among a handful of affluent families, a huge gap that many blame on the free-market policies imposed during the Pinochet regime.

And as Sunday’s election clearly shows, disillusionment in politics is soaring. Although voter registration was made automatic for the first time, and penalties for not voting were eliminated, 44 percent of registered voters stayed away from the polls.

On Sunday there was no bigger symbol of that disenchantment than at Bachelet’s campaign office in Santiago, where a group of students briefly occupied the headquarters and hung up a banner outside the building that read: “Change is not in La Moneda (presidential palace), but in the streets.”

With wire services