Gabriel Boric assumed the presidency of Chile in a ceremony full of symbols for a new era

With a presidential sash knitted by “revolutionary” seamstresses, a breakfast with neighborhood leaders before the ceremony, a suit without a tie, a victim of police violence as a special guest and a woman behind the wheel of the Ford Galaxie who will take you through the streets of Santiago, the progressive Gabriel Boric assumed the presidency of Chile this Friday.

“Before the people and peoples of Chile, I do promise,” Boric said, later raising his left fist and signing, after a great sigh, his position as the highest authority in the southern country.

Surrounded by women who will lead the new government in Chile, Boric, 36, became the country’s youngest president, in one of the most challenging moments since Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year dictatorship ended in 1990.

As a sign of this commitment to equality, a large part of the women in the cabinet attended the investiture dressed in lilac or purple, the color of the feminist struggle: “That is going to be part of our administration. Our daughters are not alone, our mothers, our grandmothers, ”said the new government spokeswoman, Camila Vallejo, collects AFP.

The former student leader was moved, holding back tears, upon receiving the presidential sash alongside Piñera, a 72-year-old millionaire businessman, who is ending his second term (2010-2014; 2018-2022) as part of a political cycle that brought progress thanks to a neoliberal model that also left a large gap in social inequality that tired a large part of society and detonated in massive protests in October 2019.

After the ceremony, the ministers were sworn in before President Boric, starting with Izkia Siches, a 35-year-old doctor by profession, who will be the first female Minister of the Interior.

Like most of the officials in the political circle closest to Boric, Siches is also part of the generation of students who, like the president, led the protests that in 2011 demanded better access to free and quality education and exposed the social gaps that it left. the young Chilean democracy.

Among the multiple signs of the investiture day, Boric received the social organizations first this Friday at an official breakfast at the presidential summer house in Cerro Castillo, on the Pacific.

After finishing the ceremony in Valparaíso and then in Santiago, the protocol ride in a convertible Ford Galaxie will be conducted by Carabineros NCO Lorena Cid, part of her escort since November 2021.

To the inauguration he invited, between national and international authorities, the young university student Gustavo Gatica, who was shot by rubber bullets in both of his eyes during a day of protest on November 8, 2019, in the midst of clashes between Carabineros ( Uniformed Police) and demonstrators in downtown Santiago.

He also invited a large group of representatives of the different indigenous peoples.

“It is a historic milestone that we have a Magellanic president and that he is the youngest is a source of pride,” said César Montiel, a 70-year-old retiree who approached the fences arranged around the mansion and who, like Boric, is from Punta Arenas, a city located more than 3,000 km south of Santiago.

And, as several Boric supporters beg, that “people don’t ask him to fix the problems right away,” Montiel said.

Honks and shouts for or against Piñera and Boric were thrown from the cars and also by passers-by who passed in front of La Moneda Palace, where Boric is expected to close his day with a message to the country from a balcony tonight.

Boric intends to start a path towards a welfare state in the style of European social democracy, to keep his word to turn Chile, where 1% of the population owns 26% of the wealth, into the “tomb” of neoliberalism.

The leftist takes office with a credibility crisis in politics, a cut in public spending of 22.5%, an estimated slowdown in the economy for this year, a large irregular migration and an unresolved historical land conflict between the State and the Mapuche town.

Another challenge will be to gather support for the final part of the constitutional process that this year must call a plebiscite to approve or reject a new Constitution to replace the one inherited from the dictatorship.

“This is a government that comes to power in a very fragmented political climate, that does not have a parliamentary majority and, therefore, does not have the possibility of making very radical reforms in the short term,” says Claudia Heiss, head of the race. of Political Science at the University of Chile, reports EFE.

However, “there is also this optimism that comes from the constituent process and an impulse to overcome neoliberalism that I think is seen today with less fear by even conservative sectors, because there is a kind of anti-neoliberal sentiment in the world,” he added. the academic

Among the guests at the Congress were President Alberto Fernández from Argentina, Pedro Castillo from Peru, Guillermo Lasso from Ecuador, King Felipe VI from Spain, as well as the writers Gioconda Belli, from Nicaragua; and the Chilean ‘best seller’ Isabel Allende, who is part of the delegation from the United States.

“Boric has promised dialogue to overcome these problems and it remains to be seen if this predisposition to dialogue translates into citizens not exhausting themselves once again waiting for solutions,” explains Rodrigo Espinoza, an academic at Diego Portales University.

For his part, Piñera handed over his presidential sash to the socialist senator Álvaro Elizalde, recently appointed president of the Senate, who later placed his on Boric.

Subsequently, Piñera placed the new president with the pickaxe, a five-pointed star of the liberator Bernardo O’Higgins who represents the highest authority of the southern country, to close the change of command with a hug between the outgoing and incoming president.

The metal badge was hung from Boric’s presidential sash, made by the seamstresses of the Revolutionary Textile Union of Chile.

Boric sang the national anthem with his hand on his heart and at the end he said goodbye shaking hands with former President Piñera, who left the Congress hall with his wife to applause. (I)