Boric, from student leader to president of Chile in just a decade

Since the progressive Gabriel Boric led the student marches in favor of gratuity until this Friday he arrives at the La Moneda presidential palace as the youngest president in Chilean history, only a decade will have passed.

A meteoric path that has always piloted the same idea: to combat inequalities in Chile by ending the neoliberal model installed during the military dictatorship (1973-1990) and building a welfare state similar to European democracies, with an ecological, feminist and regionalist.

“If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism in Latin America, it will also be its tomb”, he used to repeat during the electoral campaign.

turn to moderation

When the race to La Moneda began in July of last year, no one imagined that the young deputy for the southern Magallanes -just turned 36- would end up winning the December 19 ballot over far-right José Antonio Kast with 55.8% of the vote. the votes and almost 12 points of difference.

They were the elections with the greatest political tension since the end of the regime and young people and women played a fundamental role in his overwhelming victory.

A staunch defender of the constitutional process in which Chile is immersed and of the wave of protests at the end of 2019, Boric moderated his speech in the final stretch of the campaign to get into the pocket of the centrist electorate and scare away the fear it generated in the business community. his alliance with the communists.

A turn to the center that he also demonstrated when he announced at the end of January the names that will make up his cabinet, among which is that of Mario Marcel, the former president of the Central Bank and champion of fiscal consolidation headed by the Treasury.

“We are going to make all the changes that we have proposed step by step because we have the convention that the vast majority of Chileans demand structural changes that make it possible to have a decent life.”, he stated on January 4.

In addition to the youngest, Boric will also be the first president who is not part of the two traditional center blocks that have led the country since the return to democracy.

A new pension system that replaces the current one of individual capitalization, forgiveness of university credits, creation of a universal health fund or an ambitious tax reform to collect up to 5% of GDP are some of his government promises.

The first feminist government

Boric will also make history because of the composition of his cabinet, the first with more women than men on the continent (14 compared to 10) and where the Ministry for Women will play a leading role, integrating for the first time the hard core of the Government, together with powerful portfolios such as Treasury or Interior.

“I want to ask you, men in particular, to take feminism seriously, that this is not a banality, a postmodern response to identity demands”, said the future president last week.

Close to former Uruguayan president José Mújica and Pablo Iglesias and Íñigo Errejón, founders of the Spanish Podemos party, and critic of the Bolivarian regimes in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, Boric is a symbol politician.

Proof of this is the choice of a union of feminist seamstresses to embroider his investiture band or the decision to rent an old house in a decadent neighborhood of the capital to establish his presidential residence.

His closest circle comes from his time as a student leader: his right-hand man is Giorgio Jackson, who is credited with Boric’s moderation and who will be in charge of the government’s relations with Parliament, a very important position considering the future fragmentation of the hemicycle.

Both entered Parliament for the first time in 2014 and three years later founded the Broad Front, the political formation with which they landed in La Moneda in coalition with the Communist Party.