The winner, Sebastián Piñera, 60, joins Alan García of Peru, Felipe Calderón of Mexico and Álvaro Uribe of Colombia as clearly right-wing leaders presiding over major Latin American countries, where left-wing candidates with socialist agendas have held more sway in recent years.

In the campaign, Mr. Piñera, a Harvard-trained economist and former senator, promised to carry on many of the social programs put in place by President Michelle Bachelet, who was leaving with approval ratings hovering around 75 percent. Mr. Piñera’s victory brought to an end the 20-year hold on power of the center-left Concertación coalition, which steered Chile out of its long and bloody dictatorship.

“In the institutionalized electoral democracies in Latin America over the last decade there has been a lessening of the ideological polarization between left and right and a convergence on macroeconomic stability and a framework of social justice,” said Cynthia J. Arnson, the director of the Latin American program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

Candidates of the left still do well. In recent years left-wing candidates have won elections throughout Latin America. Voters in Paraguay elected a former priest with a socialist agenda, and Uruguay elected a former Marxist-inspired guerrilla to succeed a successful Socialist doctor as president. In 2007, Argentines voted for the wife of their previous president. She has continued his socialist, populist policies.

But in Brazil, the popular Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who came into the presidency as a self-described leftist, leaves office after this year having proved to be more of a center-left pragmatist. Neither of the probable finalists in the election — Dilma Rousseff, Mr. da Silva’s chief of staff, and the centrist São Paulo governor, José Serra — is expected to take the country right and jettison popular social programs that have helped relieve extreme poverty, analysts said.

“Latin America is not swinging in one direction or another; it is swinging in many different directions at the same time,” said Michael Shifter, the vice president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a policy research group in Washington.

A few years ago a radical shift seemed under way. Starting with the election of Hugo Chávez, a former coup plotter, in 1998, and continuing with the election of Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, the leaders of the so-called Bolivarian countries railed against the economic neo-liberalism espoused by Washington, nationalized their industries and more clearly positioned themselves as an alternative pole of political and economic ideology, analysts said.

“But even in these countries the outcomes reflected less the embrace of leftism than a desire for a new kind of politics,” Mr. Shifter said.

The leftist leaders elected since 2006 actually owe their support to centrist, not leftist, voters, analysts said. “The political center is the only part of the electorate that has increased in Latin America in the last decade,” said Marta Lagos, the director of Latinobarómetro, an opinion survey of the region. The number increased to 42 percent from 29 percent between 1996 and 2009, she said.

While the right triumphed on Sunday in Chile, Mr. Piñera takes over in March with a relatively weak mandate. His center-right coalition will not have a majority in Congress, and he was elected with 29.9 percent of the total number of eligible voters over 18 years old, an even lower total than Ms. Bachelet’s previous historic low percentage in 2006, Ms. Lagos said. Among those who voted, Mr. Piñera won with 52 percent of the vote to the 48 percent of his opponent, a former president, Eduardo Frei.

That underscores the deep antipathy that many Chileans had toward this year’s election and their cry for political renewal. Some voted for Mr. Frei in the end out of fear of the right’s ties to the dictatorship-era government of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

Chileans were clearly fatigued with 20 years of the Concertación, and, Ms. Arnson said, were frustrated with the Concertación’s “failure to open up and allow a younger generation of political leaders to play a more prominent role.”

Despite Ms. Bachelet’s popularity, she was never viewed to be the head of the coalition, which was effectively leaderless this past year, Ms. Lagos said.

As it has in the past, the Concertación restricted participation in its primary election last year, leading 36-year-old Marco Enríquez-Ominami, a Socialist, to break off and run as an independent. He won 20 percent of the vote in the first round, and he forced the Bachelet government to agree this month to carry out some of his proposals to help Mr. Frei’s chances.

Mr. Piñera has taken pains since Sunday to be respectful to the Concertación, which is credited for maintaining macroeconomic stability while bringing down poverty in Chile, one of the most economically unequal countries in the hemisphere. Last month the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of the world’s most developed democracies with market-based economies, invited Chile to join.

On Monday, Mr. Piñera said, “In Latin America today we are experiencing a true rebirth and boom in democracy,” and he reiterated that he would not “start from zero,” saying he would build his cabinet from “independents” and possibly members of the Concertación, as well as from his own coalition.

He had breakfast with Ms. Bachelet at his mansion on Monday morning. She invited him to go with her on a presidential trip to Cancún, Mexico, next month.