Boric’s victory in Chile is a hope for all of Latin America – Camilla Desideri

Chile has a new president. Gabriel Boric, 35, on 19 December won the second round of the elections, obtaining 55.8 of the preferences and affirming himself over the far-right candidate José Antonio Kast. Supported by the coalition of Apruebo dignidad, a very large group that includes the Communist Party up to center-left formations, on 11 March Boric will succeed Sebastián Piñera (center-right) becoming the youngest president of the country, representative of a political class that has grown and was formed in a democracy.

Born in 1986 in Punta Arenas, in the southernmost part of Chile, Boric knows the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet more from what he has read and told him than from his personal experience. It belongs to a generation born at the turn of the democratic transition and entered politics in 2011, with student protests that broke out precisely to criticize the “successes” of the transition, the continuity of the neoliberal model that emerged during the military regime and the profound inequalities of Chilean society.

Students, then as now, demanded free and free education and a state that guaranteed all Chileans the same opportunities. The following year Boric was elected president of the student federation of the Universidad de Chile, imposing himself on one of the most visible figures of the movement, Camila Vallejo. Then in 2013, along with Vallejo and two other former student leaders under 30, Boric was elected to the Chamber of Deputies.

Dialogue and alliances
But perhaps the key moment in his political career was in 2019, during the demonstrations that erupted at the end of October against the increase in the price of the subway ticket and in a short time became the largest protest movement since the return to democracy in 1990.

In fact, on 15 November Boric had supported the agreement to seek a political exit from the crisis and convene a constituent assembly with the task of rewriting the constitution, a legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship. It has been criticized by many comrades and allies, but has gained institutional and political credibility. As Brazilian journalist Carol Pires on Folha de S.Paulo points out, now Boric will have to make further concessions and weave new alliances to govern.

However, precisely this ability to dialogue in a non-dogmatic way could be his strength and transform him into the representative of a new Latin American left: attentive to the demands of the feminist movement and the needs of minorities as a key to building a more just society, critical of governments authoritarians from Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, determined to focus on a green economy. Boric managed to overturn the result of the first round on November 21, when Kast had obtained the majority of the votes, because he reached out to the center and the moderates, seeking the support and support of the Christian Democracy and the Socialist Party, including that of former president Michelle Bachelet (now United Nations high commissioner for human rights) who in a video had invited Chileans and Chileans to go and vote for him.

Boric won the Chilean elections by promising structural changes, expressing the needs that emerged from the social protests of 2019 and then led to the election of the constituent assembly, where the independents are the great majority. Today young people know they live in a freer country with more opportunities than the one in which their parents grew up, they recognize the successes of the democratic transition but denounce an economic model that has led families to borrow for health and education. and pensions. Everyone wants to receive the benefits of the “Chilean miracle”, which has built a country with the best economic indicators in the region but where the wealth is in the hands of a few families. Economist Noam Titelman, a Chile scholar, defined Boric’s program as an attempt to “democratize democracy”, bringing together concerns about the “end of the world” linked to the climate crisis with the need to make it to the end of the month, and therefore social rights.

On the eve of the vote on 19 December the scrittore Patricio Fernández, elected as an independent in the constituent assembly, he wrote words of praise and hope in Boric: “I know him. He is my friend. I know his ability to understand and include proposals that go beyond those of his group to which he belongs. He is the best and least dogmatic of his. He is curious, free, courageous. ‘My beliefs’, he likes to repeat, ‘are always accompanied by doubt like a shadow’. He has no trouble recognizing his mistakes. He is young, therefore quick to react in the face of a future that comes towards us at an unprecedented speed, but he usually seeks the testimony of experience. He likes history, conversation, cold and simplicity. He lives in a small apartment in Santiago, nothing in him denotes personal ambitions, he prefers poetry to objects, and even if in the last decade the knowledge of power has taken away the innocence of the beginnings, in his eyes a clean light continues to shine which makes it trustworthy like few others. I hope he wins “.

Gabriel Boric has won, he will be the youngest president of Chile and Latin America, the new voice of a left that will have to confront an increasingly strong and dangerous right, and will have to do it without falling into populism and personalism, as happens to many leaders of the region. On his government weighs the task of carrying out the social, ecological, political and cultural transformations that will emerge from the constituent and of making them sustainable and practicable. An ambitious and difficult challenge, but at the same time incredibly stimulating.