Second round in Chile: Gabriel Boric, the candidate who promises “profound changes” in his country

Gabriel Boric pleaded for “hope to beat fear” before voting on Sunday when this 35-year-old former student leader went to the second presidential round with a far-right rival who assures that his victory will bring chaos to Chile.

“We represent the process of change and transformation that is coming, (but) with certainty, with the gradualness that is necessary,” he promised from his native city of Punta Arenas (south), on the shores of the Strait of Magellan, where this politician dreamed since childhood with a welfare model for your country.

Boric wears, as he calls it, “a lighthouse that lights up a desert island” tattooed on his left arm and relaxes by reading, but his real life is that of a left-wing activist.

Boric, who ran at the minimum age to aspire to the presidency of Chile and was the youngest of the seven candidates who competed to succeed the conservative Sebastián Piñera, will be measured in the December 19 ballot with the far-right lawyer José Antonio Kast, 55 years.

Boric represents the “I Approve Dignity” coalition, which brings together the Broad Front and the Communist Party.

His greatest reproach to democracy after the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) is having continued with the liberal economic model that left a middle and lower class in debt to pay for education, health care and private pensions.

Many of his followers and detractors saw him grow as a political leader since 2011, when he led student protests for free education, in one of the countries with the most expensive education in the world.

“Our generation bursts into politics in 2011 throwing away a little of the fears that the dictatorship and the transition pacts had generated,” he said in an interview with AFP.

He thus alluded to the Concertación, a center-left coalition that since 1990 governed a good part of the 31 years of democracy, and that today lies disintegrated and discredited as a reflection of the great crisis of institutional confidence.

Of Croatian and Catalan descent

In the final stretch of the campaign, this young man of Croatian and Catalan descent abandoned his style of rebellious university student for an image of an orderly student, consistent with the moderate tone and negotiator of this new stage.

At his time as leader of the Federation of Students of the University of Chile, 10 years ago, he attributes the beginning of the questions to a model for which it was important “to fight to make Chile a fairer country,” he said.

Although then the Chilean democracy was only 20 years old, these students questioned “the development model”, the absence of social rights, they denounced that education for the privileged and not a right, as well as a health system for the rich and another for the poor.

The social revolt that shook Chile in October 2019 arrived, in which Boric played a leading role by signing the political agreement – from which the Communist Party (PC), which supports it today – was subtracted to call a plebiscite and thus change the Constitution inherited from the dictatorship.

In campaign he condemned the regime of Nicolás Maduro

His detractors reproach his inexperience, his alliance with the PC, his lack of a university degree despite having finished Law School and also his changes in positions.

His rivals in the presidential race rescued tweets from Boric saluting Nicolás Maduro as the new president in Venezuela after the death of Hugo Chávez in March 2013, but in the campaign the candidate condemned that regime and rejected the greeting of a communist leader for the recent Daniel Ortega’s victory in Nicaragua.

“In our government the commitment to democracy and human rights will be total, without endorsements of any kind for dictatorships and autocracies, annoy whoever bothers,” he recently wrote on social networks.

His followers include renowned artists such as Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín, author of “No” (2012) and “Jackie” (2016), son of the Minister of Justice of the current Piñera government and whose family is one of the so-called right-wing elite.

Boric “has within him the hope of many,” Larraín told the Spanish newspaper El País from London.

Single and a native of southern Punta Arenas, he grew up in a family related to the Socialist and Christian Democratic parties.

“I am from Southern Patagonia, where the world begins, where all stories and imagination merge, in that Strait of Magellan that has inspired so many beautiful novels,” this avid reader said proudly.

If he becomes president, he wants to “ensure a welfare state so that everyone has the same rights, no matter how much money they have in their wallet.” (I)