MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

With help from her rival, Chile's Bachelet poised to win presidential election in the first round

An over whelming 78% of Chileans believe the next president will be Michelle Bachelet

Former president Michelle Bachelet holds a huge lead in Chile’s presidential election this year and may attract enough support to win outright in the first round, a key poll showed this week. An estimated 47% of Chileans surveyed by pollster CEP said they would vote for Bachelet if the election were held this Sunday, while 14% backed right-wing candidate Evelyn Matthei and 10% supported independent economist Franco Parisi.

Around 16% said they were undecided or would not vote. Only five percent of respondents predicted Matthei would win the election, compared to 78% for Bachelet. Among those who said they definitely or probably would vote, 54%t backed Bachelet.

The poll suggests that support for Bachelet is gathering pace and that she is close to getting the 50% she needs to win the presidency outright on November 17, without the need for a runoff in December. No candidate has accomplished that feat since 1993, when Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei beat a right-wing rival.

Chile has seen rapid economic growth in recent years and declining poverty, but income inequality has remained high. Bachelet, who served as president from 2006 to 2010, has said she wants to address that, principally by hiking corporate taxes to pay for an education overhaul.

In the CEP poll, 61% of respondents offered a positive evaluation of Bachelet while 15% offered a negative assessment of her. Matthei had 23% a positive evaluation of Matthei and 53% a negative view.

Bachelet’s strategy to date has been to keep a low media profile in favor of touring the country, meeting people and giving speeches in town plazas. She has been trying to persuade supporters to vote for her Nueva Mayoria coalition in congressional elections in order to ease the passage of her reforms through Congress, including a new Constitution for the country.

Electoral rules were changed last year to make voting voluntary, adding an element of doubt to the outcome, with polls suggesting disenchantment with politics is growing. The candidate for the incumbent Alianza coalition, Matthei, is tainted in the eyes of many Chileans by her family associations with the 1973-1990 Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, as well as disenchantment with the current right-wing administration of Sebastián Piñera.

She has struggled to garner much support since being nominated last July, although polls to date have suggested she would make it through to a second round. An Ipsos poll last week showed Bachelet getting 32% of likely voters with Matthei at 20% and Parisi at 14%t.

In CEP’s last poll published in August, around 44% of those surveyed favored Bachelet and 12%.