Chilean election heads to runoff

SANTIAGO, Chile, Dec. 14 (UPI) -- Center-right billionaire Sebastian Pinera won the first round of Chile's presidential election, boosting his bid to upend the left-of-center government.

With 98 percent of Sunday's balloting counted, the conservative Pinera led the field with 44 percent of the vote, The New York Times reported Monday. Eduardo Frei, a former president who was seeking to succeed party incumbent Michelle Bachelet, was second with 30 percent.

Neither candidate topped the 50-percent threshold needed to avoid a January runoff because of a strong showing by independent Marco Enriquez-Ominami, a 36-year-old filmmaker and former Socialist Party congressman, who finished in third place Sunday, capturing 20 percent.

Pinera, 60, campaigned to the middle class, which he said didn't benefit from the Bachelet government, the Times said.

In his second bid to be president, Pinera pledged to create a million jobs and crack down on drug traffickers. He lost in 2005 to Bachelet.

"There is a demand for diversity in Chilean politics," Marta Lagos, a pollster and political analyst in Santiago, told the Times. "Polls show that 60 percent of the people in Chile say that none of the candidates represent their ideas well. There is a real questioning here of what is democracy."