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Chile's Pinera wins presidency as opponent concedes

Other News Materials 18 December 2017 04:01 (UTC +04:00)
Billionaire conservative Sebastian Pinera won Chile’s presidency on Sunday, with his center-left opponent Alejandro Guillier conceding the election as Chile followed other South American nations in a political turn to the right.
Chile's Pinera wins presidency as opponent concedes

Billionaire conservative Sebastian Pinera won Chile’s presidency on Sunday, with his center-left opponent Alejandro Guillier conceding the election as Chile followed other South American nations in a political turn to the right, Reuters reported.

With 98.44 percent of the ballots counted, Pinera, 68, had won 54.57 percent in the run-off vote, to 45.43 percent for senator Guillier, a wider than expected margin in a race that pollsters had predicted would be tight.

Months of campaigning exposed deepening rifts among the country’s once bedrock center-left, an opening former president Pinera leveraged to rally more centrist voters around his proposals to cut corporate taxes, double economic growth and eliminate poverty in the world’s top copper producer.

In his concession speech at a hotel in downtown Santiago, Guillier called his loss a “harsh defeat” and urged his supporters to defend the progressive reforms of outgoing President Michelle Bachelet’s second term.

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