Boric, referent of a new left in Latin America?

He does not skimp on criticism of the Bolivarian regimes, but he is not condescending to the center-left either: the future president of Chile, the progressive Gabriel Boric, travels in a little explored territory in the region, which some experts are already venturing to baptize as a new left Latin American.

“If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism in Latin America, it will also be its tomb,” he used to repeat during the electoral campaign who will become this Friday, at just 36 years old, the youngest president in Chilean history.

Struggled in student struggles and with strong environmental, feminist and regionalist convictions, Boric will also be the first president who is not part of the two traditional centrist blocs that have led Chile since the return to democracy in 1990.

The one who was a deputy for eight years is a firm defender of the constitutional process in which Chile is immersed, he wants a welfare model similar to the European one, with a new pension system that replaces the current one -of individual capitalization and inherited from the dictatorship- , and proposes an ambitious tax reform to collect in four years up to 5% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

“He is not a populist”

For Carlos Malamud, principal researcher for Latin America at the Elcano Royal Institute, Boric is “unique” in the region for several reasons, such as “his marked youth”, “his political experience but not management” and “his distance from populist postulates that have marked the continental left all this time”.

“Boric is sold as a social democrat, a definition that is not very common in Latin America and is quite reviled by the Bolivarians,” he said.

In fact, the illegitimate Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, referred to him in February as a “failed and cowardly left in the face of imperialism and the oligarchies.”

Political scientist Julieta Suárez-Cao, from the Catholic University, agrees that Boric is anything but a populist, but differs from Malamud in his label: “More than a social democrat, I think it is a reformulation of the Latin American institutional left,” she said.

“Boric bursts onto the Chilean political scene as an alternative that questions the legacy of center-left governments,” added Guillermo Pérez, from the Institute for Studies of Society (IES).

Although he won the elections with a coalition between the Broad Front and the Communist Party, the former student leader has integrated moderate figures into his cabinet, in an attempt to please the conservative and fearful Chilean business community.

In the Treasury he placed Mario Marcel, former president of the Central Bank and champion of fiscal consolidation, while in the Foreign Ministry he appointed Antonia Urrejola, former president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and staunch critic of Maduro, as well as the Nicaraguan Daniel Ortega and the Cuban Miguel Díaz-Canel.

“As much as Boric presents himself as a distant leader from the Bolivarians, within his coalition there are parties that have been very ambiguous in their condemnations, such as the communists,” Pérez warned.

Does he look like Lula or Mujica?

The former Vice President of Bolivia Álvaro García Linera and the Belgian philosopher Chantal Mouffe are his great intellectual references and he is very close to former Uruguayan President José Mujica and Pablo Iglesias and Íñigo Errejón, founders of the Spanish Podemos party.

Despite being on the same ideological spectrum, Suárez-Cao considers that Boric has little to do with progressive presidents in office, “much more populist and traditional” and little given to criticizing Maduro, such as Andrés Manuel López Obrador (Mexico), Pedro Castillo (Peru), Luis Arce (Bolivia) or Alberto Fernández (Argentina).

Malamud, from Elcano, sees some resemblance to the Uruguayan Broad Front, although with nuances: “Tabaré Vázquez or Mujica lived through the Cold War and the Cuban Revolution, which undoubtedly marked their way of understanding the world.”

They have also compared him to former Brazilian President Lula da Silva, who is emerging as a favorite if, as it seems, he stands in the October elections.

“Boric can be understood as a new left because of his youth, but he has a similarity with Lula. In fact, he is one of the guests at his investiture, ”said Sebastián Salazar, from the University of O’Higgins.

For Pérez, from the IES, the future Chilean president “has two souls that are constantly in conflict”: one more revolutionary and the other more moderate and statesmanlike, who ended up prevailing at the end of the electoral campaign.

“If the former governs -he concluded-, it is probable that Boric will not make much of a difference in the Latin American scene. Instead, with the second, he can contribute to the discussion and become a kind of hinge between the leaders of the region”, she concludes.