Jorge Eduardo Alessandri Rodríguez (; 19 May 1896 – 31 August 1986) was the 26th President of Chile from 1958 to 1964, and was the candidate of the Chilean right in the crucial presidential election of 1970, which he lost to Salvador Allende. He was the son of Arturo Alessandri, who was president from 1920 to 1925 and again from 1932 to 1938. Early years Jorge Alessandri was born in Santiago. He studied at Instituto Nacional General José Miguel Carrera, prestigious public high school of Santiago, and University of Chile, and after graduating in 1919 worked there as a lecturer. After the fall of the parliamentary republic, he lived in European exile with his parents from 1924 to 1925, but returned to his native land where he was elected to parliament as an independent from a Santiago constituency in 1926. He withdrew from public life in 1932 to concentrate on business interests, becoming president of the mortgage bank, Caja de Crédito Hipotecario until 1938 and running the Paper and Cardboard Manufacturing Company. From 1944 to 1947, he was chairman of the Chilean employers' confederation. Return to politics The early years of the Presidency of Gabriel González were marked by serious unrest between left and right-wing supporters, and on 2 August 1947 González named a cabinet of military officers and independents in a supposed attempt to depoliticise the situation. Alessandri was named Minister of Finance, where he reordered the system of administration and pursued a rigorous programme of austerity. By 1950, he had restored order to the public finances and controlled inflation. However, his freezes of public sector remuneration gradually led to greater industrial unrest. Public sector workers came out on strike at the end of January 1950, which rapidly turned into a broad opposition against the government's economic policies. Along with the rest of the cabinet, Alessandri resigned on 3 February, and returned to his role as president of the employers' confederation. Senate and presidency In 1956, the Liberal Party selected him as a candidate for a Santiago Senate seat, which he won with a substantial majority in 1957. However, Alessandri was seen as rather conservative by the Liberal Party, and in the end it was the moderate wing of the Conservative Party which secured his position as an independent candidate for the Presidency, with his campaign majoring on his economic expertise. In March 1958, he edged the united left