Next Step : Front-Runner Sends Chile a Reassuring Message : Eduardo Frei isn’t charismatic and he promises no surprises. Amid economic progress and stability, he seems to be just what Chileans want.

A rally here last week for the front-runner in Chile’s presidential election campaign drew only a few hundred people. They filled less than half of a dusty square, flanked by boxy old apartment buildings and blue-blossomed jacaranda trees.

Although the announcer called the early evening gathering a Magno Evento , it obviously wasn’t so great for most of the 70,000 residents in this agricultural community northwest of Santiago.

Presidential candidate Eduardo Frei arrived late in a big bus with a small entourage, made a short speech from a flatbed truck, then left. Most of the people in the square were gone before he was.

Frei, 51, is not attracting big crowds to his campaign appearances. He is not inspiring mass enthusiasm with his media proclamations. He is not charismatic, photogenic, brilliant or flamboyant.

In his lackluster speeches, which have a stolid and plodding sound, Frei promises no revolutionary changes, no surprises--just more of the economic progress, political stability, peace and quiet that Chileans have learned to cherish.

And despite their apparent apathy, it seems clear that this no-frills, no-thrills candidate is just the kind most Chileans want as president. It shows in the polls, which give centrist Frei up to 60% of the voter preference against candidates to his right and left. His nearest rival, conservative Sen. Arturo Alessandri, mustered less than 20% in polls published last week.

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So there seems no question that Frei will win Saturday’s elections by a comfortable margin. Alessandri’s hopes for a runoff vote, needed only if Frei wins less than a majority Saturday, appear to be futile.

“This is an election without ‘swing,’ without emotion,” said Ricardo Lagos, a prominent Socialist leader attending the Quillota rally. “The result is already known.”

But the election does have deep democratic significance. As the first presidential contest since Gen. Augusto Pinochet left power in 1990, it will consolidate the transition begun with free elections in 1989 that set the stage for the end of military rule here.

Chilean voters will reconfirm their desire to walk a smooth and level political path away from the 16 years of harsh dictatorship under Pinochet, and from the turbulent administration of Socialist President Salvador Allende, which ended with Pinochet’s 1973 coup.

If there is any nostalgia at work in this campaign, it is for the centrist Christian Democratic administration of Frei’s late father, also Eduardo Frei, who preceded Allende in power. The Christian Democrats are now allied in the governing Concertacion coalition with the “renovated” Socialist Party, which has renounced Marxism, and two center-left parties--the Party for Democracy and the Radical Party.

Under President Patricio Aylwin, a veteran Christian Democrat elected in 1989, the Concertacion has carefully preserved a market-oriented policy designed to favor private-sector investment and free trade as pillars of economic and social development.

“The country has perceived that the Concertacion has been capable of giving economic, social and political stability,” said Juan Villarzu, Frei’s economic adviser. “That is the great asset of the Concertacion, and Frei embodies that asset very well.”

While that may be, no one doubts that Frei’s main political asset has been his father’s name. The son’s political star has risen recently and rapidly.

During most of the Pinochet dictatorship, he quietly pursued a successful career as an engineer and partner in a civil engineering firm. He made an unsuccessful bid to become his party’s candidate in the 1989 elections, and ended up winning a Senate seat instead. His service in the Senate has been unremarkable, according to most assessments.

There isn’t much remarkable in Frei’s personal life either. A practicing Roman Catholic, he has been married to Marta Larrachea since 1967. They have four daughters, ages 13 to 24. Descriptions of Frei’s personality tend to “methodical,” “conventional,” “logical.”

“He is, intellectually, a project engineer: concrete to the point of boredom,” said a recent profile in the conservative newspaper El Mercurio. “The praise that everyone makes is very strong common sense.”

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Candidate Alessandri, however, casts doubt on Frei’s capacity to organize a government administration. Alessandri, who has watched Frei in the Senate, said in a recent interview: “Christian Democracy is a very well-organized party, but Frei I don’t think is a very organizing person, or someone to carry something forward. Because I think he is . . . a more passive personality, I would say--recognizing many human qualities. I have the best opinion of him as a human being, as a person, as a father.”

Alessandri, perhaps more than Frei, has failed to convince most Chileans of his own leadership capacity. He is a corporate lawyer, and his political career also has been brief: a truncated stint in the lower house of Congress before the 1973 coup, and his Senate term beginning in 1990.

Like Frei, Alessandri has capitalized on his name: His grandfather Arturo Alessandri was president twice in the 1920s and 1930s, and his uncle Jorge Alessandri from 1958 through 1964.

Alessandri, 69, is running as an independent backed by the country’s main conservative parties but has no party organization at his command. White-haired and handsome, he projects the image of a charming gentleman, but not of a political heavyweight.

Four other presidential candidates also are running in Saturday’s elections, but none has received more than 5% or 6% in recent polls. They are:

* Jose Pinera, an independent conservative with no party backing. Pinera was a Cabinet minister in Pinochet’s military regime and is credited with creating Chile’s successful, privately run retirement pension system.

* Manfred Max-Neef, an economist running with the support of ecology groups and many unaffiliated youths.

* Eugenio Pizarro, a Catholic priest backed by the Communist Party and other Marxists.

* Cristian Reitze, a leftist supported by the tiny Humanist-Green Alliance.

Saturday’s voting also will renew the 120-seat Chamber of Deputies, Chile’s lower house of Congress, and fill 18 seats in the 46-member Senate. The Concertacion, which currently has a majority in the Chamber but not in the Senate, is emphasizing that it needs more congressional seats to pass reforms in legislation left by the Pinochet regime.

Among bills the Aylwin administration has been unable to get through Congress is one that would give the president authority to remove military commanders. Pinochet has stayed on since 1990 as commander of the army.

According to the constitution, the winner of Saturday’s balloting is to serve an eight-year term. But last week the coalition endorsed a six-year presidential term, with no immediate reelection. If that passes as a constitutional amendment before March 11, inauguration day, Chile’s next presidential elections will be in 1999.

Whether the Concertacion will hold together that long is a matter of lively speculation. Antonio Cortes, a political analyst with a pro-Socialist think tank called Centro Avance, predicted growing tensions within the coalition.

The Concertacion was formed in a united effort to ease the transition to democracy, but its left-leaning sectors will increase pressure for more “progressive” social action in coming years, Cortes predicted. This could generate conflicts with centrist Christian Democrats, he said in his Santiago office. Frei may find himself caught in the middle, forced to choose between conservative economic policies and liberal spending programs.

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Most analysts are forecasting a slowdown in Chile’s economy, which expanded by a spectacular 10.4% last year. Next year’s growth rate is expected to be 4% or less. Cortes observed that slower growth will mean less job creation, stingier salary increases and tighter budgets.

“I don’t see a crisis, but I do see greater difficulties in the social area,” he said. Those difficulties, he added, could stir up labor unrest and social discontent, fueling dissent within the Concertacion.

Villarzu, Frei’s economic adviser and widely expected to be Chile’s next minister of finance, disagreed in a separate interview. Although worldwide recession is causing a temporary decline in Chile’s economic growth, he said, the economy remains sound and the Concertacion is committed to social progress.

He said Socialists, Christian Democrats and others on Frei’s economic advisory committee have agreed unanimously on a program that will continue the basic policies of the current administration.

Frei, speaking in Quillota, emphasized the unexciting but reassuring message of continuity.

“If we have the opportunity to give continuity to the government of President Aylwin, it is thanks to the seriousness and responsibility that we have demonstrated in our coalition,” he said. “We have been capable of giving leadership to the country. We have been capable of conducting an exemplary process. And for that reason we are going to give continuity, because Chileans appreciate it.”