MICHELLE BACHELET ended her first term as Chile’s president in 2010 with an approval rating of 78%. Barring a major upset, she looks set to return for a second term next year with that popularity intact. On June 30th she won a primary election within the Concertación, Chile’s centre-left coalition, with almost embarrassing ease. One of four candidates, she took 73% of the vote. The runner-up, Ms Bachelet's former finance minister Andrés Velasco, took 13%. In a presidential election on November 17th she will face Pablo Longueira, a combative former economy minister and stalwart of the conservative Independent Democratic Union. Mr Longueira narrowly won the centre-right primary, also staged on June 30th. The margin of Ms Bachelet’s victory suggests that November’s vote won’t be much of a contest: of the 3m votes cast in the two primaries, Ms Bachelet took over 1.5m, nearly twice as many as the two centre-right candidates combined. Last year voting, which had previously been compulsory, was made voluntary, adding an element of unpredictability to this year's race. Turnout at the primaries was much higher than had been expected, at 23%, giving them some credibility as predictors of November’s election result. On current form, Ms Bachelet could win in the first round, something that no candidate has managed in the past 20 years. She would be the first president in 88 years to win a second term in office. The rhetoric of the election campaign suggests a second Bachelet government would be a good deal more leftist than her first. She has promised to transform higher education, making it a not-for-profit, free-for-all affair within six years. That is a sop to students, who have staged massive protests against the government of Sebastián Piñera since 2011. Such generosity would cost the equivalent of between 1.5% and 2% of GDP, Ms Bachelet says. She plans to pay for this by raising the corporate-tax rate from 20% to 25% over four years, and doubling a stamp tax on borrowing operations to 0.8%. She also plans to scrap the Taxable Profits Fund (FUT), set up under military rule in 1984 to encourage investment. It allows firms to defer indefinitely the payment of tax on their re-invested profits. Ms Bachelet says there is no reason why companies shouldn’t meet all their tax liabilities within the fiscal year. Her proposal to scrap the FUT (although, handily, only during her final year in office) has alarmed the business community and the Piñera government, which says the move would stifle investment.

Ms Bachelet has also promised a more liberal approach to social affairs. She says she wants to legalise gay marriage and allow abortion in some limited circumstances (Chile is among the handful of countries in Latin America that still ban abortion outright, including when the mother’s life is in danger). Her other proposals are more vague. She says, for example, that she wants a new constitution, without saying what it would look like. She wants a new electoral system, but has not said which one.

There is a good chance that Ms Bachelet’s leftism will be tempered in the months between now and the election. The results of the primaries suggest a highly polarized country: Ms Bachelet is a Socialist whereas Mr Longueira represents the most conservative wing of the centre-right. Between their contrasting ideologies sit millions of centrist voters with no real representation. Both candidates are likely to drift centre-wards between now and November to try to woo those voters.

There are still a couple of things that could dent Ms Bachelet’s campaign. A number of independent, left-leading candidates have vowed to run for the presidency. One of them, Marco Enríquez-Ominami, took 20% of the vote in the first round in 2009. Although he is unlikely to repeat that showing, he could eat into Ms Bachelet’s support. And a lot of voters have yet to express an opinion. Over 10m Chileans didn’t bother to turn out for the primaries but might be persuaded to do so in November. Even If she wins the presidential race, Ms Bachelet will hope that her allies do well in parliamentary elections due to be held on the same day. During much of her first term in office she was hamstrung by the lack of a parliamentary majority, just as Mr Piñera has been during his tenure.

Her right-wing adversaries will throw everything they can at Ms Bachelet. They have accused her of a clumsy response to the 2010 earthquake, which came at the end of her first term. But the allegations don’t seem to have stuck. Ms Bachelet’s support in Maule and Bío Bío, the two regions worst affected by the quake, is as strong as it is elsewhere. If the primaries are anything to go by, Chileans seem poised to give their country’s first female president another crack of the whip, with a Congressional majority to boot.