Chile has not voted a right-wing president into office since Jorge Alessandri campaigned and won as an independent, center-right candidate in March 1958.
But Sebastián Piñera may well break that precedent on Jan. 17. Having won the first-round election on Dec. 13 with 44 percent of the vote, Piñera fell shy of the simple majority required to avoid a run-off. He now faces Eduardo Frei, a former president representing the governing center-left Concertación coalition, who took only 30 percent of the first-round vote.
In a country that has not seen a right-wing government since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship in 1990, part of Sebastián Piñera's success stems from his record as a centrist. He says he voted to remove Augusto Pinochet from power in the pivotal 1988 referendum that returned Chile to democracy, and on the campaign trail he called Pinochet Chile's worst president.