Gabriel Boric, the leftist candidate who won the recent presidential elections in Chile, had promised to bury the neoliberalism imposed by military dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Boric said, “If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave.” Boric is part of the brave new millennial generation seeking justice and equality. With his age of 35, Boric is the youngest person ever to become the president of Chile. He has a bold and ambitious vision of inclusive development, much different from the old-style moderate leftist leaders like Michelle Bachelet, who was president for two terms. With her limited leftist agenda, she did not pursue reforms strongly and vigorously.
Boric will be the most leftwing president of Chile since Salvador Allende, who was overthrown in 1973 by general Pinochet. The US supported the coup in the name of the ‘war on communism’. Boric’s coalition includes the communist party of Chile. Allende should be smiling in his grave.
Boric has pledged to reduce inequality by raising the minimum wage, reducing the cost of education and health care, expanding social safety net, fighting climate change and extending rights to native peoples as well as gays and transgender people. Although the Chilean economy has been stable with high growth rates, the poor and middle-class people have been struggling with high cost of living while the private sector businesses make high profits and pay low taxes. To pay for the expanded social programmes, Boric plans to raise the taxes on the rich, increase mining royalties, increase efforts against tax evasion and impose a “green tax”. Boric has further pledged to replace Chile’s private pension system with a universal public one.
Boric is unmarried, has no children and is an avid reader of poetry and history. He rose to prominence during the 2011 student protests against the high cost of education and other social injustices inherited from the neoliberal economic model devised by the Chicago Boys (economists trained in Chicago) hired by Pinochet.
Boric was president of the student federation of the University of Chile in 2012 when he was studying in the faculty of law. But he left his studies incomplete and entered politics. In 2013, at the age of 27, he was elected to the Congress as an independent, along with many other young leftist activists. He declared, “Don’t be afraid of the youth who want to change Chile.” He got re-elected in 2017.
Boric, who has tattoos, caused an uproar when he showed up on the first day in the Congress without a tie and suit jacket, calling political decorum a “tool of the elite” that separates lawmakers from the people.
Boric combines his idealism with a realistic and pragmatic approach. In 2019, he broke with his leftist allies and backed a political accord with center-right President Sebastian Pinera to begin a process to replace the dictatorship-era constitution in order to restore calm. In November, he distanced himself from his communist allies who offered glowing praise for the re-election of Nicaragua’s leftist authoritarian President Daniel Ortega. Boric will not be radically pushing for unilateral extremist ideas. He knows the formidable challenges of the rightists and the fear of the people, which drove them to vote for Jose Antonio Kast, the rightwing candidate. In any case, he does not have his own political party in the Congress to push through his legislative reforms. He needs to work with the parties of both the left and right to get his bills passed in the Congress.
The election of Boric complements the centre-left Constitutional Assembly, which is drafting a new constitution for better social justice. The assembly has gender parity and is being presided over by Elisa Loncon, a female Mapuche language scholar. The assembly includes 17 members from the indigenous communities who were excluded from political power by the Pinochet constitution.
If Kast had won, it would have been an anticlimax to the new movement for social justice and the new constitution currently being drawn up. Kast is opposed to the new constitution and is an admirer of dictator Pinochet. His own brother was a member of the cabinet of Pinochet. Kast had shown solidarity with Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. The defeat of Kast is a clear message to Bolsonaro and other aspiring far-right extremists in Latin America.
The victory of Boric comes in the wake of the recent election of leftist candidates Xiomara Castro in Honduras in November and Pedro Castillo in Peru in June this year. Leftist candidate Lula is already leading in the opinion polls for the Brazilian presidential elections to be held in October next year.
The peaceful elections and the graceful acceptance of defeat by the loser have demonstrated yet again the strength and maturity of Chilean democracy. The Chilean voters have given chances alternately to the left and the right in the last five presidential elections. Both the leftist president Michelle Bachelet and Sebastian Pinera, the billionaire conservative, had avoided extremist positions and preferred stability and continuity.
When protests erupted in 2019, President Pinera recognised that the protesters had legitimate grievances and quickly agreed to their demand for a new constitution. In the May 2021 elections for the Constituent Assembly, the Chilean voters punished both the mainstream leftist and rightist coalition parties and elected mostly centre-left independent activists. Out of the 155 seats, the rightist coalition won only 37 seats while their leftist counterpart got just 25 seats.
It is heartening to see that Kast has accepted the defeat gracefully and has declared even before the final count, “From today, Boric is the elected President of Chile and deserves all our respect and constructive collaboration”. This is in sharp contrast to Trump’s refusal to accept the electoral verdict and Bolsonaro’s threat to follow Trump’s shameful approach.
With the election of Boric and the drafting of a new constitution, the stable democracy of Chile is poised to become a more inclusive and equitable democracy. This should be an inspiration for other countries of Latin America, which have similar challenges of poverty and inequality.
The author is an expert in Latin American affairs
