Former Chilean president Sebastian Pinera died in an accident while aboard a helicopter. The aircraft would have crashed but the details on the dynamics of the dramatic accident have not yet been disclosed. The local media reported it.
Pinera approached politics while he was an entrepreneur. In 1989 he headed the presidential campaign of Hernán Büchi, former finance minister in Pinochet's government, an election in which he was elected senator in the Santiago East constituency. Immediately afterwards, he joined the centre-right National Renewal party.
In 1992 he attempted to run in the 1993 presidential elections, but was involved in a scandal known as “Pineragate”. He attempted to run for senator in 2001, but gave up after a member of his political promotion, and member of the allied Independent Democratic Union (UDI) party, Joaquín Lavín, made it clear that he would never support candidates from Piñera's party, instead supporting the no longer Admiral Jorge Arancibia. In the meantime he became leader of the National Renewal party.
On May 14, 2005, he ran for office in the 2005 presidential elections (the RN party was expected to support Lavín's UDI party), and headed the center-right coalition Alianza por Chile. On January 15, 2006, she lost the runoff against the socialist Michelle Bachelet, who won and assumed office with 53% of the vote. But this defeat did not weaken him: he ran for president again in the 2009 general elections where he unified the centre-right forces in the Coalition for Change. In the first round of 13 December 2009 he obtained 44.7% of the votes, prevailing over Eduardo Frei, candidate of the centre-left Concertation of Parties for Democracy coalition, who obtained 29.06% of the votes. He then won the run-off with 51.87% of the votes. He then took office on 11 March 2010.
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