Polls & Research

Conservatives Could Secure Chile’s Next Presidency

(Angus Reid Global Monitor) - The long-governing centre-left Agreement of Parties for Democracy (CPD) faces a difficult challenge in Chile’s next presidential election, according to a poll by Universidad Diego Portales. 28.1 per cent of respondents would prefer to have Sebastián Piñera of the conservative National Renewal (RN) as their head of state.

The CPD’s former president Ricardo Lagos is second with 9.7 per cent, followed by former foreign minister Soledad Alvear of the Christian-Democratic Party of Chile (PCD) with 6.4 per cent, and current Organization of American States (OAS) secretary-general José Miguel Insulza with 4.9 per cent.

The centre-left CPD—which includes the Socialist Party (PS), the PCD, the Party for Democracy (PD) and the Radical Social-Democratic Party (PRSD)—has not lost a single presidential election in Chile since the return of democracy after the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in March 1990.

Michelle Bachelet—a former defence minister—was elected in a January 2006 run-off as the CPD candidate with 53.49 per cent of all cast ballots, defeating Piñera. She officially took over as president in March 2006.

Since taking office, Bachelet has faced massive protests staged by high school students complaining about the poor quality of public education, as well as street demonstrations in Santiago, the capital city, over the botched implementation of a new transportation program called Transantiago.

On Nov. 23, following the legislature’s approval of what he called "a small amount of money" to deal with Transantiago’s challenges, Piñera called for Bachelet to "solve the problem not with aspirin, but with major surgery, which means going through the routes, calculating the exact number of buses needed, building the necessary road infrastructure."

The next presidential election in Chile is scheduled for December 2009.

Polling Data

Who would you prefer as the next president?

Sebastián Piñera	28.1%
Ricardo Lagos	9.7%
Soledad Alvear	6.4%
José Miguel Insulza	4.9%
Not sure / No reply	32.3%

Source: Universidad Diego Portales
Methodology: Face-to-face interviews with 1,302 Chilean adults, conducted from Sept. 28 to Oct. 18, 2007. Margin of error is 2.7 per cent.