Conservative billionaire Sebastian Pinera has been sworn in as Chile's president, returning to the job after four years of centre-left rule with promises to revive investments in the world's top copper producer.

Mr Pinera, who governed Chile in 2010-2014, accepted the presidential sash from outgoing socialist president Michelle Bachelet in a ceremony on Sunday in the Pacific port city of Valparaiso.

The billionaire was elected in December with a strong mandate, marking a new rightward shift in South America after conservative leaders rose to power in Peru, Brazil and Argentina.

His second term begins as prices for copper exports are rising, bolstering government revenues and driving growth in Chile's US$250 billion economy.

Related reading Former billionaire president returns to power in Chile after election

But he will face a divided congress and a prickly leftist coalition that has vowed to fight his plans to lower taxes and "refine" Ms Bachelet's progressive policies.

Presidents from across the region attended Mr Pinera's swearing-in ceremony, including Brazil's Michel Temer, Mexico's Enrique Pena Nieto, Bolivia's Evo Morales and Argentina's Mauricio Macri.

The 68-year old Mr Pinera and his wife waved at supporters as they passed through streets packed with cheering Chileans waving the national flag.

Mr Pinera is scheduled to deliver a speech later on Sunday.</s>Conservative politician Sebastian Piñera on Sunday took the presidential oath of office for the second time at the seat of Congress in Valparaiso in a ceremony attended by around 1,400 people.

"I swear," the 68-year-old Piñera said after the head of the Senate, socialist Carlos Montes, posed the traditional query: "Do you swear or promise to faithfully execute the Office of President of the Republic, to preserve the nation's liberty and to protect the Constitution and its laws?"</s>SANTIAGO, CHILE — Sebastián Piñera, a political conservative, returned to Chile’s presidency on Sunday, vowing to revive an economy that slumped under the departing center-left leader Michelle Bachelet.

Ms. Bachelet handed the presidential sash to the president of Congress, who then swore in Mr. Piñera — who himself turned over the office to Ms. Bachelet in a similar ceremony four years ago.

Mr. Piñera, a billionaire entrepreneur, oversaw growth that averaged 5.3 percent a year during his first term from 2010 to 2014, aided by pro-business policies, rising prices for Chile’s chief export, copper, and a giant rebuilding effort following a magnitude 8.8 earthquake that hit just before he took office.

A slump in copper prices helped sour Ms. Bachelet’s second round as president, with the economy — and the president’s popularity — slipping badly in 2014 and 2015. Ms. Bachelet, the first women to lead the country, had been wildly popular when she ended her initial term and handed power to Mr. Piñera.

“From Day 1, Piñera is going to want to show that under him, the wheels of the economy will start to spin again,” said Cristóbal Bellolio, a professor of government at the Adolfo Ibáñez University.

Mr. Piñera’s first administration was marked by major street demonstrations demanding reforms in education and other services, as well as by the start of softening copper prices. He left office with favorability ratings in the 30s.</s>VALPARAÍSO, Chile: Conservative billionaire Sebastian Piñera was sworn in Sunday to his second term as president of Chile, replacing socialist Michelle Bachelet in the office for the second time in eight years.

An emotional Bachelet helped Piñera put on the sash of office, gave him a kiss and then left Congress with members of her government.

Piñera, who was president from 2010-2014, has promised to stimulate growth and create jobs.

He made a strong call for national unity in his first speech, delivered from a balcony of the La Moneda presidential palace late Sunday, promising a “healthy culture of dialogue, agreements and collaboration.”

“We are committed to being a government of progress and solidarity, which will allow us, within eight years, to transform Chile into a developed country without poverty,” said Piñera, joined on the balcony by his wife Cecilia Morel.

The 68-year-old communications magnate is assuming the presidency just as Chile’s economy is showing signs of rebounding from a period of sluggish growth due to low prices for copper, the country’s biggest export.

“The good times are coming,” his supporters chanted after he was sworn in.

Bachelet was cheered by supporters as she capped a second term in office in which she saw through an ambitious package of reforms aimed at eliminating the institutional legacy of the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Leaders from neighboring Latin American countries, including Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico and Peru—as well as the former king of Spain Juan Carlos—attended the inauguration ceremony at the congress in the coastal city of Valparaiso.

Later, the billionaire president chose a shelter for at-risk children in a depressed district of Santiago to announce his first measures as president, the reform of state protection for vulnerable children.

The new president called for a national agreement on the care of children, and said his new cabinet would for the first time include a minister for children.

He said some 1,313 minors had died in centers run by the National Service for Minors over the last decade. More than half the young people who pass through the state centers later become delinquents, according to Piñera.

The new president pledged to increase resources and subsidies to help tackle the problem.

In his speech at La Moneda, he also highlighted as a priority his quest for peace in the tense southern La Araucania region, the epicenter of a conflict with Mapuche indigenous communities.</s>Allie is a Verdict staff writer. You can reach her at Alexandra.Nawrat@verdict.co.uk

Billionaire Sebastián Piñera of the centre-right coalition Chile Vamos (Let’s go Chile) was inaugurated yesterday as Chilean President after winning 54.6% of the votes in the December elections.

Piñera’s net worth is $2.8 billion as of 3 March 2018 making him the fifth richest person in Chile, according to Forbes.

He will replace Michelle Bachelet, Chile’s first and only female President. He also succeeded Bachelet last time he was President between 2010 and 2014.

To win the Presidential election, a candidate has to receive 50% of the votes.

At the end of November, Piñera failed to win a majority – he won 36.6%. Piñera had to face a second round election – called a run-off. It is rare for Chilean Presidents to win an outright majority in the first round.

In the run-off Piñera faced Alejandro Guillier of Bachelet’s Nueva Mayoria (The New Majority) left-wing coalition since he received the second highest number of votes in the first round – 22.7%.

Due to strict Presidential term limits as a result of Chile’s dictatorial past, Bachelet was unable to stand in the 2018 election (candidates are not allowed to hold successive terms in office).

According to Sergio Urzua, Associate Professor in Economics at the University of Maryland, who participated in a discussion panel for think-tank Inter-American Dialogue,

Piñera won 3.8 million votes in the run-off election – this is the highest number of votes a Chilean President has won since 1990 when the country transitioned back to democracy following Augusto Pinochet’s 15-year dictatorship.

Like many countries in Latin America, Chile has struggled to generate significant economic growth since the global financial crash in 2008-9.

Chile’s economy stagnated during Bachelet’s term – annual growth was approximately 1.9% from 2014.

This was “by far the lowest in any administration since the 1990s” according to Urzua.

Average annual economic growth during Piñera’s first term from 2009 to 2014 was 5%.

The economic stagnation has especially concerned the middle classes who have prospered as a result of the commodity boom centred on copper production.

They are worried that they could fall back below the poverty line if the economy fails to improve.

These factors made economic affairs central to the Presidential election.

Piñera’s strong showing in the polls after becoming Chile Vamos’ official Presidential candidate in July 2017 led to a resurgence of the Chilean stock market after six years of stagnation, according to the Financial Times.

In November 2017 the country’s stock market was up 28% compared to 2016, which means Chile is outperforming all regional peers except Argentina.

The markets were encouraged by Piñera’s electoral campaign centring on a commitment to revitalise Chile’s stagnant economy as well as a presumption he will act in the same way as he did during his first term when he enacted pro-business policies.

Piñera’s slogan for the 2018 Presidential election was Better Times Ahead.

According to the Santiago Times, Chile’s English language newspaper, during the campaign he declared “we need to replace the bad government to improve the country which is currently stagnant.”

During the Inter-American dialogue panel event, McLarty Associates Latin American regional director Gabrielle Trebat said:

Academic at New York University who specialises on Chilean politics, Patricio Navia, told Verdict:

During her term in office, Bachelet undertook many social reforms in an attempt to reduce social inequality in Chile. These reforms included educational and labour reforms – however, the primary one was the increase in corporate taxes.

The corporate tax rate has been set at a minimum of 27%. This is the highest in the region making it difficult for Chilean companies to compete across the Latin American continent.

These reforms were widely criticised as being poorly designed and implemented.

Both the Chilean business community and the general population were critical of them – according to Urzua “since the very beginning, more than 50% of people were reporting that they were not happy with them”.

A major issue was that they made economic growth into a secondary governmental priority.

Piñera has said he will not reverse these reforms, instead he will perfect them.

Bank of America Merill Lynch economist Ana Madeira told the Financial Times:

Piñera has pledged he will amend the labour reforms and cut corporate taxes.

In order to safely secure his electoral victory, the billionaire appealed to unity during his run-off election campaign.

Piñera said after winning the most votes, but failing to win a majority in the first round:

According to The Economist, as well promising economic growth, he pledged more handouts for the poor and extra public spending for pensions, healthcare and education to satisfy the middle classes.

Trebat argued that Piñera will have to continue to respond to societal demands throughout his tenure since he cannot repeat the mistakes of his first term when “he was viewed as much more close to CEOs and executives than he was to the people”.

His ability to roll back the reforms will be further hindered by his Chile Vamos coalition not holding a majority in the Chilean Congress.

Legislative elections for Chile’s National Assembly occurred simultaneously to the first round of the Presidential election.

Chile Vamos won 46% of seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 44% in the Senate.

Bachelet’s Nueva Mayoria coalition won 27% of seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 34% in the senate.

Director of the Centre for the Study of Political Opinion at the University of Chile Robert Funk commented in the Inter-American dialogue event:

Trebat said she believed amending the corporate tax rate would be “his first real challenge” in the National Assembly because “an increase in the corporate tax rate helped to bring in some much needed revenue.”

During the Inter-American dialogue discussion, Trebat characterised Piñera’s upcoming balancing act between placating domestic political demands and the markets as threading a needle.

Piñera will be aided in his upcoming four-year term by the increasing prices of Chile’s main export commodity, copper.

Copper prices have risen by more than 20% since mid-2016 to a three-year high of approximately $7,000 per tonne according to the Financial Times.

Chile is the world’s largest producer of copper and depends on it for almost half of its total export revenue.

According to the Observatory of Economic Complexity, Chile’s exports of copper ore and refined copper are worth $24.4bn per year. The second most valuable Chilean export commodity is sulphate chemical woodpulp at $2.27bn.

The Economist argues the 5% economic growth Piñera presided over during his first term was helped by the high price of copper.

However, analysts note that Piñera will also benefit from appearing more open to investment than Bachelet’s administration, particularly in the realm of copper.

His position as Chile’s fifth richest man undoubtedly makes him seem more business savy than socialist, medically trained Bachelet.

Bachelet’s reforms have been blamed for the fall in investment into Chile’s copper-dependent economy. The Financial Times reported investment fell from 7% of GDP in 2013 to 3.5% in 2017.</s>Want to contact Sebastian Dalseide directly? Get phone numbers, email addresses, org charts and more for virtually everyone working in entertainment!</s>Businessman-turned politician Sebastian Pinera was sworn in as Chile’s president on Sunday, beginning what will be his second term in office after a four-year absence. At a brief ceremony before members of the national congress gathered in the central port city of Valparaiso, Pinera received the presidential sash from outgoing center-left President Michelle Bachelet for the second time, since she had turned over the reins to Pinera in 2010. Since 2006, the two have alternated in office.

Pinera, 68, was re-elected in last November elections, promising to lower taxes and boost investment, and will serve until 2022, Xinhua reported. According to Forbes magazine, Pinera is the fourth wealthiest man in Chile, with an estimated fortune of $2.8 billion. Following the ceremony, Bachelet and her cabinet left the venue to rounds of applause. Neither Bachelet nor Pinera made a speech.</s>In an interview at the presidential palace a week before the end of her term, Ms. Bachelet said she was proud of her legacy.

“We haven’t done everything we wanted, and some things didn’t come out perfectly,” Ms. Bachelet said. “But the truth is that we have accomplished more than what many thought possible.”

At the end of a transformative era for Chile, a country of nearly 18 million, many question the long-term viability of the sweeping policy changes Ms. Bachelet put in place to expand civil rights and access to higher education.

“I think there were several advances for women during her two governments,” Alicia Moreno, 47, a social worker, said of Ms. Bachelet. “But she lacked strength to carry out the big reforms we all expected.”

Her first election as president was a milestone that turned her into a global icon of female empowerment, a status that helped her win hard-fought victories last year. Chile’s Constitution does not allow consecutive second terms.

When Mr. Piñera succeeded her, his election in 2010 was pathbreaking, too, as he was the first right-wing leader elected since democracy was restored in Chile in 1990, after a 17-year military dictatorship led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

At this political turning point, interviews with the departing and incoming presidents suggest, there is much the two political figures in Chile agree on.

Both say they believe the country should continue to be a beacon of free trade. Both want to see even deeper ties with China, Chile’s top trading partner, and have rebuffed Trump administration warnings that Beijing is consolidating itself as a colonial, exploitive power in Latin America.

The two leaders are bullish about Chile’s transformation into a renewable-energy powerhouse and the country’s role as a global leader in countering climate change. And both say Chile should continue to welcome immigrants, even as a large wave of recent arrivals from Haiti and Venezuela has called into question the country’s capacity to absorb so many newcomers at once.

But there is plenty on which they disagree. To begin with, there is Ms. Bachelet’s legacy: an ambitious overhaul of the tax system, labor laws and public education. Mr. Piñera argues that she overreached and that her efforts amounted to taking a “bulldozer” approach to governing.

The departing president, however, argued that structural changes were necessary.

“This is a changed country,” Ms. Bachelet said in the recent interview in Santiago, the capital. “People are more empowered. The middle class is a lot more aware of its rights and its needs; people demand more each day; and political institutions are viewed with a growing level of distrust.”

During her latest four-year term, the government transformed Chile’s electricity grid, weaning a nation poor in fossil fuels of its dependence on hydrocarbons by building an expanding network of solar and wind-powered grids that have made electricity cheaper and cleaner.

Her government also created protected marine areas and a vast network of national parks in the southern Patagonia region that will shelter much of the country’s forest land and coastline from development.

She is credited with strengthening consumer protections and labor rights and passing an electoral reform law that made Chile’s political system more inclusive by breaking up a two-party system and broadening the participation of women. The electoral overhaul also limited the influence of private-sector money in campaigns.

Her signature legislative victory: getting a deeply divided Congress to approve the legalization of abortion in limited circumstances.

Beatriz Sánchez, a rising political star who came in third in the first round of last year’s presidential race, said the changes set in motion by Ms. Bachelet might become clear with time.

“Her main achievement was proposing, with deep conviction, an agenda of real change that shifted the conversation in Chile toward a society that valued rights and not just markets,” said Ms. Sánchez, who is to the left of Ms. Bachelet politically.

Mr. Piñera, however, says there is much that his predecessor got wrong.

“I don’t doubt the president’s good intentions,” he said during an interview this past week at his office in Santiago. “But you know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Among Ms. Bachelet’s most controversial changes was her aggressive push to expand access to free higher education through programs that today cover about 340,000 students. That initiative was financed by raising corporate taxes, which Mr. Piñera and other critics said drove away investors.

While it was a laudable goal, Mr. Piñera argued, Ms. Bachelet’s education policy is unsustainable and has degraded the quality of universities.

The education overhaul and other programs were tough to fund as economic growth slowed because the price of copper, Chile’s top export, dropped. Last year, the country’s fiscal deficit topped $8 billion, or 2.8 percent of its gross domestic product — a level that Mr. Piñera called irresponsible.

When Mr. Piñera, 68, ran for a second time, he handily defeated Ms. Bachelet’s favored candidate, the left-wing former journalist Alejandro Guillier, in December by convincing voters that he was best suited to jump-start economic growth.

The incoming president says he will cut bureaucratic bottlenecks, court foreign investment more aggressively than his predecessor did and seek to foster unity on economic policy in an increasingly fractured, and left-leaning, Congress. “It won’t be easy,” Mr. Piñera said. “First, we will need to restore confidence in the country.”

Chile’s economic growth will continue to rely heavily on its robust relationship with China, which in 2010 outpaced the United States to become Chile’s top trading partner, Mr. Piñera said.

“The relationship with China has been a good relationship, and it is expanding beyond commercial matters, to investment and cooperation in science and technology, environmental issues and several other fronts,” he said.

“China has been gaining ground in Latin America in part because China has been pursuing it and partly because the United States is stepping back.”

Mr. Piñera has expressed disappointment that the Trump administration has yet to present a coherent policy toward Latin America while warning the region about drawing closer to China.

“We’ve seen signs — building a wall along the border with Mexico, the deportation of immigrants, protectionism,” he said. “But a clear policy that would allow us to evaluate the foreign policy of the United States toward the region is still not on the table.”

As a sign of how muddled the Trump administration’s approach is, Mr. Piñera said that when he had a lengthy, cordial conversation with President Trump shortly after the Chilean election last year, Mr. Trump expressed surprise when the president-elect pointed out that the United States had a trade surplus with Chile.

But foreign policy is unlikely to be among the thornier issues Mr. Piñera faces when he assumes office on Sunday. He won the second round of voting by an ample margin, and Chileans elected a strikingly politically diverse Congress during the first round. Anticipating a vigorous political opposition, Mr. Piñera has portrayed himself as a deal maker and a moderate.

“I want to replace the perverse logic of the bulldozer that destroys everything in its wake for the wise culture of dialogue, agreement, collaboration,” he said.

Mr. Piñera has extended an olive branch on an initiative Ms. Bachelet failed to get across the finish line, vowing to support passage of a bill that would allow transgender people to update their names and gender on government documents.

Yet he remains opposed to another bill, which would legalize same-sex marriage, arguing that “situations that are different” cannot be “treated the same way.”

And as he sets out to accelerate economic growth, Chileans will be watching closely whether any new wealth is distributed equitably, Ms. Sánchez, the former candidate, said.

“If they seek to keep things as they are, where wealth grows and remains hyperconcentrated in few hands while most people’s salaries barely cover basic expenses, he won’t have an easy time making deals in Congress,” she said.

And university students, who staged mass protests during Mr. Piñera’s first term, are likely to become a thorn in his side if the subsidies Ms. Bachelet established are pared.

“Piñera promises more work and growth, but just like in his first government, he’s going to govern for the rich and the businesspeople,” Pablo Vilches, 22, a university student said.</s>What it takes to be on the Court.</s>The director of the Carabineros, Chile's militarized national police, submitted his resignation Monday to new President Sebastian Piñera amid embezzlement and evidence-tampering scandals plaguing the force.

"I have accepted the resignation of Bruno Villalobos from the position of director general of the Carabineros as part of our program to become more efficient in fighting crime, drug trafficking and terrorism," Piñera told the press at La Moneda palace.
Sebastian Piñera takes office for the second time as President of Chile.