Sebastian Pinera, a billionaire with investments in Chile's main airline, most popular football team and a leading TV channel, heads into Sunday's presidential election with a good chance of returning the right wing to power for the first time since democracy was restored 19 years ago.

Opinion polls put Pinera far ahead of Eduardo Frei, a former president who represents the fraying center-left coalition that has governed Chile since Gen. Augusto Pinochet ended his dictatorship. A victory by Pinera would mark a tilt to the right in a region dominated by leftist governments.

The 60-year-old businessman is expected to keep the fiscally prudent policies of the ruling coalition as he focuses on fighting corruption and bringing new faces to government.

Outgoing President Michelle Bachelet has sky-high 78 percent approval ratings, but the left couldn't agree on fewer than three candidates, none of whom have close to her popularity. Pinera also has made a point of appealing to centrists.

"Pinera is the most moderate candidate that the right has ever had," said Patricio Navia, a Chilean political analyst who teaches at New York University.

The elections are unlikely to produce radical changes in Chile, an economically stable copper producer, Navia said. "The big surprise of this election is that all the candidates are proposing very similar policies."

Pinera lost to Bachelet in 2006, but has topped all polls since beginning his third campaign for president last year. The latest survey, published Wednesday, had him falling short of a first-round victory, with 44 percent of the votes to 31 percent for Frei.

Marco Enriquez-Ominami, a congressman who broke with the socialists after realizing that primary rules favored Frei, would get 18 percent and leftist Jorge Arrate would get 7 percent, according to the poll by the Center for the Study of Contemporary Reality. The poll had an error margin of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Despite those numbers, trends suggest a first-round win for Pinera can't be ruled out, center director Carlos Huneeus said, concluding that "the right is in a better position than ever" to reach the presidency.

It remains to be seen whether Chile's leftist coalition could regroup ahead of a second-round vote Jan. 17, but polls indicate Pinera would win then as well _ with 49 percent to 32 percent against Frei, and a slightly tighter margin of 47 percent to 35 percent against Enriquez-Ominami. The center polled 1,200 people nationwide between Nov. 24 and Dec. 5.

"We are going to win by a wide margin," Pinera predicted as he prepared for a campaign-closing rally in the capital Thursday. The other three candidates planned to close their campaigns elsewhere in Chile.