Gabriel Boric’s triumph puts wind in the sails of Latin America’s resurgent left
At the age of 14, Gabriel Boric – the great-grandson of a Croatian migrant and an avid reader of Marx and Hegel – formed a city-wide student union in the Chilean city of Punta Arenas. At 21, and by then a law student, he led a campus sit-in for 44 days in Santiago, Chile’s capital, to oust a senior professor accused of plagiarism and corruption. Two years later, in 2011, he was elected figurehead of a massive student rebellion against profiteering private universities, and in 2013 became a congressman for his remote home region.
Gabriel Boric to become Chile’s youngest president after beating far-right rival
Gabriel Boric vows to ‘fight privileges of the few’ as Chile’s premier
After protests over meagre pensions, living costs and police brutality brought millions more on to the streets from October 2019, Gabriel Boric helped channel public rage into a peaceful outlet: the redrafting of Chile’s dictatorship-era constitution. And on Sunday, Boric, 35, trounced José Antonio Kast: a Catholic law-and-order candidate nostalgic for the bloody dictatorship of General Pinochet – by a 12 percentage-point margin to become the youngest president in Chilean history.
Turnout on Sunday was
the highest – at nearly 56 percent – since voting became voluntary in 2012.
When he takes office on 11 March, Boric will be Chile’s most leftwing leader
since Salvador Allende was overthrown in 1973 – and the first from outside the
centrist blocs that have swapped the presidential sash since the return of
democracy in 1989.
The triumph of
the avowed feminist
and environmentalist has also been hailed as historic by his progressive
counterparts across Latin America, who after nearly a decade in the doldrums
have won a string of electoral victories in the past year – and are set to
notch up even more in 2022….
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