Maximum expectation in Chile for the presentation of Boric’s future cabinet

Chile awaits with great expectation the announcement this Friday of the future cabinet of the elected president, Gabriel Boric, about which no name has yet emerged, although there are several that are taken for granted.

The presentation was scheduled for this Thursday, but was delayed a day because Boric’s former campaign manager in the ballot, the independent doctor Izkia Siches, is in preventive quarantine for being a close contact of a positive.

Siches, who was president of the Medical Association and became very popular during the toughest moments of the pandemic, sounds like a minister, as does the right hand of the future ruler, the Broad Front (FA) deputy Giorgio Jackson, with whom he shared student struggles a decade ago.

The communist deputy Camila Vallejo, another of the main leaders of the student mobilization of 2011, is also in all bets.

In total there are 24 ministries, although the ones that arouse the most interest are Finance, Foreign Relations, Interior and the General Secretariat of the Presidency (Segpres), which is in charge of relations with Parliament, where fragmentation will be very high and there will be no majorities .

Parity, intergenerational and with independents

At only 35 years old and with more than 4.6 million votes, Boric became the youngest president-elect and the most votes in the history of Chile on December 19.

A defender of the constituent process in which the country is immersed and a staunch critic of the neoliberal model installed during the military dictatorship (1973-1990), Boric wants to expand the role of the State towards a welfare model similar to that of Europe.

“It has to be a transversal and diverse cabinet to offer stability. Boric’s honeymoon is going to be quite short and, the longer it is, the more chances he will have to move on,” said Kenneth Bunker, a political scientist and director of the Tresquintos pollster.

Mauricio Morales, from the University of Talca, also pointed out that it is important that there be “diversity of origin in territorial and socioeconomic terms.”

Boric, who will take office on March 11 and will be the first president who is not part of the two traditional centrist blocs that have governed Chile since the return to democracy, has said that his government will be intergenerational, with the participation of independents and parity among men and women.

“I hope that women are not relegated to issues that have always been erroneously described as feminine. Hopefully there are women leading strong and strategic ministries,” said Julieta Suárez-Cao, from the Catholic University and the Network of Political Scientists of Chile.

And the socialists?

The great unknown is with what force the Socialist Party (PS) is going to land in the cabinet, which in the first round of the presidential elections supported the Christian Democrat senator Yasna Provoste, although in the December 19 ballot it squared around Boric .

Senator Carlos Montes, one of the most valued socialist figures in the Broad Front and whose name sounds like he would occupy a portfolio, said this week that his party wants to “collaborate to the fullest” with the new president and slipped that it is possible that they will stay with two ministries.

The Christian Democracy (DC), the other great party of the extinct Concertación (centre left), has already announced that it will be in opposition.

The only name that did come out last week is that of Matías Meza-Lopehandía, an expert in human rights and indigenous movements who will become one of Boric’s main advisers.

It was also confirmed on Tuesday that the partner of the future ruler, the political scientist Irina Karamanos, will take over as first lady -something that was in the air-, although she will “reformulate” the position to give it a feminist vision.

“Reformulating it -she explained- implies adapting it to the times, giving it a more contemporary twist and depersonalizing it, it means changing the relationship between power and the women who do politics”.