Conservative billionaire businessman, Sebastián Piñera has won the first round of the Chilean presidential election, but without the majority vote needed to avoid a second round run-off on 17th January. In early official results released on Sunday, the former centre-left president led ex-president Eduardo Frei with 44 percent of the vote to Frei’s 30 percent, according to Chile’s interior ministry reports.    

Presidential candidates, Marco Enriquez-Ominami and Jorge Arrate, were eliminated in Sunday’s ballot, and Frei has appealed for their voters to support him in the run-off. However, Enriquez-Ominami has said that he would not endorse either candidate.

Chile’s current president, Michelle Bachelet, will be leaving office with high approval ratings for steering the country through the global economic downturn, and promoting progressive social reforms. Bachelet, who cannot run for a second consecutive term in office due to Chile’s constitutional term limits, has endorsed Frei, a member of her same left-leaning coalition.

In the 19 years since the fall of General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, all of the country’s presidents have come from the left-leaning coalition. If Piñera wins the January run-off, it would mark the election of the first conservative president since Pinochet’s time in power.

Piñera owns the Chilevision television channel, and stakes in Chile’s most successful football club, Santiago’s Colo Colo, and its national airline, LAN. He previously served as a senator and president of the National Renovation party. The billionaire promises that, if elected, he would accelerate Chile’s economic growth by steering the country toward more of the free-market policies favoured by the regime that overthrew socialist, Salvador Allende in 1973.

“This election pits the past against the future, stagnation against progress, division against unity,” Mr Piñera said in his final campaign speech on Saturday.