Sebastián Piñera

Sebastián Piñera (2018)

Miguel Juan Sebastián Piñera Echenique (born December 1, 1949 in Santiago de Chile ) is a Chilean billionaire , entrepreneur and politician ( RN ). He was President of Chile from 2010 to 2014 and has been President of Chile again since March 11, 2018 .

Life

Because of his father's work, the family emigrated to the United States. After returning in 1955, he attended school in Chile and from 1968 studied economics at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile , graduating as the best of his year and receiving the Raúl-Iver-Oxley Prize , named after a professor of economics at the Universidad de Chile . He then studied - like his brother José Piñera  - at Harvard University in Cambridge (Massachusetts) , where he completed his master’s degree and obtained a Ph.D. in economics.

He then returned to Chile to work for the Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe . From 1971 to 1990 he worked as a professor at the Universidad de Chile , Católica and the University of Adolfo Ibañez . In the 1980s he founded Bancard SA , which markets credit cards. Piñera was a shareholder in the airline LAN Airlines (now LATAM Airlines ) and the private television broadcaster Chilevisión with just under a third until he sold these holdings in 2010. According to Forbes magazine in 2019 has Piñera a fortune of 2.8 billion US dollars . He got rich with the introduction of credit cards in Chile in the 1980s. This makes him one of the richest active politicians in the world.

Political career

He developed his first political activity during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet . Nevertheless, as one of the few right-wing politicians of the time, he publicly admitted that he would vote for the end of the dictatorship in the 1988 plebiscite , which caused a great stir at the time. He also distanced himself from the economic policy of the Chicago Boys . In 1992 he reached the lowest point of his career when the right-wing politician Ricardo Claro published a private phone call in which Piñera and Pedro Pablo Díaz planned to vilify the conservative politician Evelyn Matthei . He served in the Senate in the 1990s before buying the airline LAN Chile and the television channel Chilevisión. In May 2005 he announced his first candidacy for the presidency.

In 2005 he opened the private nature reserve Tantauco Park in the south of the island of Chiloé .

Presidential elections 2005/06

In the 2005 presidential election , he was the presidential candidate for the Renovación Nacional . In the first ballot he defeated the politician of the Chilean right-wing party Unión Demócrata Independiente Joaquín Lavín and received 25.44 percent of the vote, which brought him to the runoff election, which took place on January 15, 2006 and which the socialists and their presidential candidate Michelle Bachelet with 53, 4 percent of the vote won.

Presidential elections 2009/10

Sebastián Piñera 100 days after starting his first presidency

In the presidential elections in Chile 2009/2010 , he ran with his party Renovación Nacional ("National Renewal") for the Coalición por el Cambio ("Coalition for Change"), which as a conservative counter-bloc against the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia (" Agreement of parties for democracy ”) for then President Michelle Bachelet, good chances were generally predicted. In fact, Piñera was able to win by far the most votes for himself and his party on December 13, 2009 with 44.03 percent. In the subsequent runoff election on January 17th against ex-President Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle , Piñera was able to collect almost 52 percent of the vote. Frei had declared his defeat after the first results were announced.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote on January 18, 2010:

"The fact that Piñera is a main owner of the largest Chilean airline as well as shares in the private television station" Chilevisión "and in the popular Chilean football club" Colo Colo "earned him the reputation of being the Berlusconi of Chile."

- Josef Oehrlein : Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

In response to criticism of the potential conflict of interest, Piñera sold its shares in the airline LAN Chile and the television channel Chilevision in 2010.

Term of office 2010–2014

Logo of the Chilean government during the Piñera presidency

As the election winner, Piñera succeeded Socialist President Michelle Bachelet for four years on March 11th. This is the first time since the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet that a conservative politician has held the presidency.

The earthquake of February 27, 2010 occurred just days before Piñera was inaugurated. During this transition period, he worked closely with his predecessor Bachelet to enable long-term aid for the affected regions.

In a report for Medico international in April 2011, the journalist Gerhard Dilger accused President Piñera of helping private companies to make profits by giving them orders after the devastating earthquake in February 2010. While Piñera's government was issuing preferential reconstruction certificates, Dilger reports that 500,000 people were plunged into poverty as a result of the earthquake and inadequate government assistance. 150,000 people made homeless by the earthquake lived in makeshift huts for a year or more. Dilger calls Piñera's reaction to the earthquake a "bureaucratized, authoritarian crisis management geared towards capital interests".

Chilean students and workers demonstrate for the regulation of the copper market

Piñera received criticism in left-wing circles above all for his stance during the education protests in 2011 and 2012 . His negative attitude towards the demand for an educational reform of the largely private education system, which originated from the time of the dictatorship, and the harsh action of the police that he called for, caused the sympathy of the people to fall dramatically. His term of office not only included the largest mass demonstrations since the end of the dictatorship, but also the most unpopular president of the country since Pinochet (with at times only 26% approval of the population).

The government lost sympathy mainly because of its late relenting, so it was only in 2012 that it was ready to hold talks with student representatives. On the other hand, the action taken by the police against the pupils and students, some of whom were still underage, ensured that civil society quickly identified with the protests, so that they quickly expanded into general protests against the consumer-oriented social structure of Chile, which had been the result of the economic reforms of the military dictatorship prevails.

On the occasion of the end of Piñera's term of office, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung ruled that his government had been "successful in many ways": "In particular, its economic balance sheet is remarkable with growth rates of over five percent and record-low unemployment."

On March 11, 2014, Michelle Bachelet took over the presidency again as Piñera's successor.

2017 presidential election

In the 2017 presidential elections, Sebastian Piñera and his Renovación Nacional party ran for the right-conservative coalition Chile Vamos . He competed against eight different candidates in the first round (in order of the share of votes after the first round: Alejandro Guillier Álvarez, Beatriz Sánchez Muñoz, José Antonio Kast Rist , Carolina Goic Boroevic, Marco Enríquez-Ominami Gumucio , Eduardo Artés Brichetti and Alejandro Navarro Brain) and won it with 36.64% of the votes cast. Together with Alejandro Guillier, the candidate of the Socialist Party , he qualified for the Nueva Mayoria coalition , which also included then-President Michelle Bachelet, for the second round of the presidential elections. Sebastian Piñera won this with 54.57% of the vote.

Term of office since 2018

He was sworn in as President on March 11, 2018. After this term of office, he will not be able to seek a third term, as this is not possible with the current constitution of Chile .

In the wake of the mass protests against social inequality , Piñera declared a state of emergency on October 20, 2019 and - for the first time since the end of the military dictatorship - had the armed forces patrol the capital. He declared that the country was in a "war against a powerful and relentless enemy." On October 27, 2019, the president dismissed his entire cabinet, but did not resign himself - contrary to what many demonstrators had asked for.

Private

Sebastián Piñera is a nephew of the Roman Catholic Archbishop Bernardino Piñera Carvallo (1915-2020) and cousin of the politician Andrés Chadwick .

Web links

Commons : Sebastián Piñera  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Personal web presence (Spanish)
• Biography at emol.com (spanish)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ BBC portrait from January 13, 2006
2. ^ Piñera profile on the Forbes Billionaires List.
3. ^ Robert G. Wesson: Politics, policies, and economic development in Latin America. Hoover Press, 1984, ISBN 0-8179-8062-8 , p. 9.
4. ^ Josef Oehrlein: Sebastián Piñera: The Berlusconi Chiles? In: faz.net . January 18, 2010, accessed February 28, 2012 . 
5. ^ President Piñera sells television channels. Der Standard, August 25, 2010.
6. ↑ cf. Billionaire Piñera wins presidential election in Chile. at nzz.ch, January 18, 2010 (accessed on January 18, 2010)
7. ↑ Jonathan Franklin : Death toll rises after Chile earthquake. In: guardian.co.uk . March 1, 2010, accessed February 28, 2012 . 
8. ↑ Chile's Disaster Capitalism. ( Memento of August 30, 2015 in the web archive archive.today ) Retrieved on August 30, 2015.
9. ↑ http://www.taz.de/Proteste-gegen-chilenisches-Bildungssystem/!75769/
10. ^ Benedikt Peters: Student Protests: Violence Instead of Talks in Chile. In: Zeit Online. October 12, 2011, accessed September 12, 2013 . 
11. ↑ Tomás Moulián: From the coalition government to the right-wing government. In: Willi Baer & Karl-Heinz Dellwo: Post-dictatorship and social struggles in Chile. Laika-Verlag, Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-942281-66-9 .
12. ↑ Setback for Chile's rights. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, November 19, 2013
13. ↑ "Chile has a great enemy called inequality". handelsblatt.com , March 12, 2014, accessed March 12, 2014 . 
14. ↑ Chile - At least ten dead in unrest. In: Zeit Online , October 21, 2019.
15. ↑ Chile's President Piñera calls on the opposition for dialogue. DW, October 22, 2019.
16. ↑ Sebastián Piñera wants to change cabinet. In: Zeit Online , October 27, 2019.