SANTIAGO, Chile - Socialist Michelle Bachelet, a separated mother and former political exile, won elections on Sunday to become the first female president in socially conservative Chile with a victory that underscores the left's growing hold on Latin America.
With almost all votes counted, Bachelet, from Chile's ruling center-left coalition, had 53 percent versus 47 percent for opposition candidate Sebastian Pinera, the government Electoral Service said.
"Who would have thought 20, 10, five years ago, that Chile would elect a woman president? ... Thank you for inviting me to lead this voyage," Bachelet told thousands of jubilant supporters outside her electoral headquarters in downtown Santiago.
Pinera, one of Chile's wealthiest men and a moderate conservative who led a rightist alliance that has been in the opposition for 16 years, congratulated Bachelet in a concession speech.
Bachelet, 54, a medical doctor who was imprisoned and tortured during the 1973-1990 Augusto Pinochet dictatorship before living in exile in the former East Germany and Australia, will be the fourth consecutive president from the center-left alliance that has run Chile since 1990.
The former defense minister is only the second woman elected to head a South American nation, and the first who is not the widow of a former president. She is set to be sworn in on March 11.
"We came to celebrate that for the first time in history women have won. We're going to have another point of view (in charge), more sensitive and more in touch with reality," said Paula Chacon, a 35-year-old housewife who brought her two children to the huge street celebration that filled Santiago's main boulevard.
Among the jubilant crowd were trendy, pierced young people and elderly couples.
FEMALE VOTE WAS CRUCIAL
Bachelet, an agnostic with three children from two relationships, benefited from a shift to more secular values in Chile, which until recently had a reputation as one of the region's most traditional and socially conservative countries.
Political scientist Patricio Navia said women were crucial to Bachelet's victory since it was the first time in Chile that a majority of both sexes had voted for a leftist candidate. In the past Chilean women always voted more conservatively than men.
"She should recognize that, and fulfill her pledge of gender parity. I think that is the campaign promise that will most shape her term in office," Navia said.
A Bachelet victory consolidates a shift to the left in Latin America, where leftists now run Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela, some with politics more extreme than others. A socialist will soon take office in Bolivia, and a leftist is favored to win Mexico's July presidential election.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, in a weekly broadcast on Sunday, called himself a "good friend" of Bachelet's.
Chavez, who says he is leading a socialist revolution in his own country, has supported other leftists who have risen to power in Latin America recently as part of his opposition to what he calls U.S. imperialism.
Bachelet is expected to be a pragmatic leftist, following in the footsteps of popular outgoing President Ricardo Lagos. Investors forecast she will continue Lagos' prudent fiscal policies, which have helped turn the copper-producing nation of 16 million people into the region's most stable economy with one of Latin America's lowest rates of poverty.
Though she generally has pledged continuity, Bachelet has promised deep reform to Chile's private pension system, which is admired around the world but considered expensive and inadequate at home.
Critics said Bachelet's platform was vague and she was just coasting on Lagos' approval rating of more than 60 percent, and an economic boom from high prices for copper, Chile's main export.
Pinera, a former investment banker and senator who led the rightist alliance, failed to convince Chileans they needed a change after 16 years under the left, despite pledges to create 1 million jobs.
Polls showed most Chileans -- an austere, skeptical people -- found Bachelet more trustworthy than Pinera.
Additional reporting by Hilary Burke
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