Boric bets on a feminist government in Chile

Gabriel Boric is close to ordinary people who come to him to make requests or wish him success in the challenging task he will take on on Friday, when he becomes Chile’s youngest modern-day president.

His, affirms the still leftist deputy, will be a “feminist government”, for which he appointed a cabinet in January in which there are 14 women and 10 men. Along the same lines, on Monday he named a uniformed police officer, Lieutenant Colonel Cecilia Navarro, the first woman in that position. In Chile, the three branches of the armed forces and the police appoint an aide-de-camp or aide-de-camp.

Boric, just 36 years old, spends much of his time at political meetings in the “small coin”, as a borrowed mansion was baptized and converted into its temporary offices since last December it won the presidency with 56% of the preferences in an electoral ballot. The nickname refers to the government palace of La Moneda, the seat of government, which will occupy from Friday.

Countless people have come to the front of the “small coin” in the hope of seeing him, speaking to him, being heard, giving him gifts, letters with requests or to tell him hastily that they worked for his victory during the presidential campaign in which he comfortably prevailed over his far-right adversary José Antonio Kast.

Nuri Flores, 71, stood for several hours in front of the house last Friday because she wanted to know “to my president, wish him luck”. He did not know that that morning Boric attended a ceremony in which it was announced how his government will incorporate the gender perspective into its state policies.

She was accompanied by her granddaughter, Ignacia Romero, a 26-year-old out-of-work journalist, who told The Associated Press that it doesn’t matter which campaign promises Boric tackles first, because “the thing is that there is a change, an improvement in the minimum wage, pensions, in health. Anything you do can help”.

Leandro Corzo, a 34-year-old Venezuelan who works as a telephone operator, traveled from Concepción, 500 kilometers south of Santiago, just to wish him luck. “I came specifically for that, I asked for an administrative day (off) to hit the pique (travel), as they say here in Chile”.

borik He does not have schedules to approach the bars and talk with visitors. He is friendly and close, smiling. He talks, receives papers with messages, listens to problems and, as a good fan of selfies, takes pictures through the bars with his admirers.

He is sometimes seen in shirt sleeves or a more traditional jacket, with short hair and a neat beard, light years from the long hair and scruffy beard he sported when he was a college administrator in 2010-2012, or during his first term as deputy (2014-2018). In 2017, he stunned the lower house with both sides of his head shaved and a Mohican-style fringe of hair. He changed his style to a near-traditional one in mid-2021, when he ran for and handily won the left-wing presidential primary over communist candidate Daniel Jadue.

borika law graduate who has not graduated, refuses the tie, and it is unknown if he will agree to wear it on Friday, when in the hall of honor of Congress he will swear or promise “perform faithfully” the position of president. He also did not use it when he was sworn in for the first time as a deputy, when he appeared dressed informally, nor did he do so when he inaugurated his second term in 2018. Faced with criticism from conservative sectors, he replied that “it is a mechanism of the elite to get away and differentiate themselves from the low town”.

Before he adopted a more formal style, he was often seen in a polera (t-shirt) or with his shirt sleeves rolled up, and he sported his best-known tattoo on his left arm: a lighthouse illuminating the sea from an islet of Magellan, the southernmost Chilean region in the world, where he was born and studied high school. He has three more tattoos, all related to Magellan.

The leftist deputy, who in a decade went from student leader to deputy twice and now to president-elect, says that his “feminist government” it means “change the way in which we relate to each other, with which we see the world, which has been told by men for many centuries”.

Less than a week ago he spoke to all men”that we keep in a way, also a little inevitable, the machismo in which we were raised”. He asked them “strongly… that we take it very seriously and that at the end of our government we can have collaborated with the cultural change that the feminist movement has pushed”.

His partner, Irina Karamanos, the next first lady of Chile, is a social scientist with studies in education, anthropology, cultural management, and is also a feminist leader of the Social Convergence party, the same party in which Boric is a member, one of the collectivities that make up the leftist Broad Front, which, added to the Communist Party, was the winning presidential bet of the Chilean left.

With Karamanos, his “companion for life” as defined by the future president, Boric showed his most romantic side. During a television program in December, he recited a poem to her and said that in private, “we call ourselves ‘chofa y chofo’, from artichoke. We really like artichokes.”

They lived in an apartment near a large central park in the Chilean capital, but for reasons of security protocol, they had to choose a new house. They chose a middle-class neighborhood near the government palace. All his predecessors lived in affluent or high-income sectors, in the so-called “Uptown”.

The next president will take office in the framework of one of the most complex situations that the South American country has faced since the return to democracy in 1990, with security problems in the north and in the south, and with galloping inflation that will become more complex with the rise in the price of oil after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Chile imports almost all of its fossil fuels.

One of Boric’s first challenges will be to get Congress to approve a tax reform to collect five points of GDP in four years, to finance his government program that has an approximate cost of US$12.5 billion, which includes improving the minimum wage and low basic pensions, create 500,000 female jobs and restructure the health system for one that is more egalitarian, in a country where those who can pay it have access to better health and education.