Sebastián Piñera, in full Miguel Juan Sebastián Piñera Echenique, (born December 1, 1949, Santiago, Chile), Chilean businessman and politician who served as president of Chile (2010–14) and was elected to a second term in December 2017.
When Piñera was a baby, his family moved to the United States, where his father, a civil servant, spent four years working for the Chilean Economic Development Agency (Corporación de Fomento de la Producción; CORFO). The family returned to Chile in the mid-1950s, then left again in 1965, when Piñera’s father was appointed Chile’s ambassador to Belgium. Piñera studied at the Catholic University of Chile, receiving a degree in commercial engineering in 1971. With the aid of a Fulbright scholarship, he returned to the United States to continue his studies, receiving a master’s degree and a Ph.D. (1976) in economics from Harvard University. He served on the economics faculty of the Catholic University of Chile throughout the 1970s and ’80s. He also taught at the University of Chile and the Valparaíso Business School (now Adolfo Ibáñez University).
Piñera worked in the consulting and banking sectors prior to his founding of the hugely successful Bancard in the late 1970s. The company, which introduced credit cards to Chile, made him a billionaire. He also held large stakes in other companies, including LAN Chile, the country’s national airline; a private hospital; and the Colo Colo football (soccer) team. Among Piñera’s other endeavours was the creation in 1993 of the Fundación Futuro, a nonprofit organization concerned with water preservation and renewable energy that also established Tantauco Park, an ecological park on the Chilean island of Chiloé.
Piñera began his political career in 1989, managing the unsuccessful presidential campaign of Hernán Büchi, former finance minister of Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet (1974–90). That same year Piñera was elected senator for East Santiago, a seat he held until 1998. He made an unsuccessful run for the presidency in 2005, as the candidate of the National Renewal party. When he ran again in 2009, he advanced to the second-round runoff election, in which his opponent was former president Eduardo Frei (1964–70), the candidate of the Coalition of Parties for Democracy (Concertación de los Partidos por la Democracia; CPD), because popular incumbent president Michelle Bachelet was constitutionally prohibited from serving a consecutive term. Piñera’s victory in the election ended 20 years of CPD rule.
On February 27, 2010, less than two weeks before Piñera was set to take office, a magnitude-8.8 earthquake struck Chile (see Chile earthquake of 2010). While Bachelet oversaw initial relief efforts, Piñera toured disaster sites and began speaking on the record as the Chilean leader. Piñera’s inauguration ceremony, on March 11, was punctuated by two powerful aftershocks. In August 2010, 33 Chilean miners became trapped in a mine collapse, and, following their rescue 69 days later, Piñera’s popularity surged. However, his government faced a major challenge in May 2011, when large student protests broke out demanding reform of the outdated, underfunded, and class-based public education system. Efforts to quell the unrest—including cabinet changes—largely failed, and in 2012 labour groups began protesting. Despite Chile’s continued economic growth, the country experienced great economic inequality, which fueled the unrest and caused further dissatisfaction with Piñera’s government. Barred from seeking a consecutive term, he left office in 2014, succeeded by Bachelet.
Piñera was back on the ballot for the 2017 presidential election. In response to a series of political scandals and the country’s stagnating economy, Chilean voters appeared ready for a change of leadership, and it was thought that front-runner Piñera might win a majority in the first round of voting to preclude a runoff. In the event, he took more than 36 percent of the vote to finish first in an eight-candidate field. Two leftist candidates—Alejandro Guillier, a onetime television news anchor representing Bachelet’s New Majority (Nueva Mayoría) coalition, and Beatriz Sánchez, of the grassroots Broad Front (Frente Amplio) coalition—collectively won more than two-fifths of the vote. Guillier, who tallied some 23 percent of the vote (Sánchez claimed about 20 percent), advanced to the second-round contest with Piñera. On December 17, 2017, Piñera was elected to a second term as president by taking some 54 percent of the vote.
