“Her main achievement was proposing, with deep conviction, an agenda of real change that shifted the conversation in Chile toward a society that valued rights and not just markets,” said Ms. Sánchez, who is to the left of Ms. Bachelet politically.

Mr. Piñera, however, says there is much that his predecessor got wrong.

“I don’t doubt the president’s good intentions,” he said during an interview this past week at his office in Santiago. “But you know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Among Ms. Bachelet’s most controversial changes was her aggressive push to expand access to free higher education through programs that today cover about 340,000 students. That initiative was financed by raising corporate taxes, which Mr. Piñera and other critics said drove away investors.

While it was a laudable goal, Mr. Piñera argued, Ms. Bachelet’s education policy is unsustainable and has degraded the quality of universities.

The education overhaul and other programs were tough to fund as economic growth slowed because the price of copper, Chile’s top export, dropped. Last year, the country’s fiscal deficit topped $8 billion, or 2.8 percent of its gross domestic product — a level that Mr. Piñera called irresponsible.

When Mr. Piñera, 68, ran for a second time, he handily defeated Ms. Bachelet’s favored candidate, the left-wing former journalist Alejandro Guillier, in December by convincing voters that he was best suited to jump-start economic growth.

The incoming president says he will cut bureaucratic bottlenecks, court foreign investment more aggressively than his predecessor did and seek to foster unity on economic policy in an increasingly fractured, and left-leaning, Congress. “It won’t be easy,” Mr. Piñera said. “First, we will need to restore confidence in the country.”