Sebastian Pinera’s wealth and promises to “make Chile great again” have made some commentators cast him as a kind of Latin American Donald Trump.
But while the 67-year-old billionaire businessman has pledged to cut public spending if he becomes president, he is not expected to completely reverse moves to increase support to poorer pensioners and students, launched by leftist outgoing president Michelle Bachelet.
Pinera himself may also not appreciate comparisons with the US president, whom he compared to Donald Duck in a tweet that went viral in January.
Son of a Chilean ambassador to the United Nations, Pinera studied commercial engineering in Chile and economics at Harvard.
He taught economics at several Chilean universities and built a business empire spanning an airline, a television station and Colo-Colo, regarded as the most successful club of Chilean football.
Forbes magazine puts Pinera’s fortune at $2.4bn, making him one of his country’s richest people.
After a stint as a senator from 1990 to 1998, Pinera won the 2010 election, becoming Chile’s first conservative president since the end of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship in 1990.
During his four-year presidency, Pinera presided over an average economic growth of more than 5%, although the success was partly attributed to surging copper prices.
But he also came under criticism for alleged conflicts of interest between business and politics, and an investigation is currently under way into whether he received illegal funds for his 2009 election campaign from a mining company.
Pinera won applause for the successful rescue of 33 trapped miners in 2010, but he also faced massive protests from students, demanding an increase in state involvement in the education sector, which saw his popularity plummet.
He tried to deflect criticism by introducing some social measures similar to those adopted by Bachelet, such as six months of maternity leave and free health insurance for low-income retired people.
Blaming Bachelet for economic growth having slowed from 6.1% in 2011 to 1.6% last year, Pinera has focused his new campaign on promises to revitalise the economy and to cut corporate taxes in a bid to attract investment.




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