Leftist ex-student activist Gabriel Boric was sworn in Friday as Chile’s youngest-ever president and hailed the country’s Marxist former president Salvador Allende in his inaugural address to the nation.
Standing in front of tens of thousands of supporters at La Moneda Palace in the capital, Santiago, the 36-year-old said Allende — who killed himself in 1973 after Augusto Pinochet’s coup — had foreseen this moment.
“As Salvador Allende predicted almost 50 years ago, we are again compatriots, opening up great avenues where free men and women will pass to build a better society. We go on. Long live Chile,” he said.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“We would not be here without your mobilizations,” the new president said to the crowd, who chanted: “Boric, friend, the people are with you.”
Boric, who plans to turn Chile into a greener, more egalitarian “welfare state,” takes over the reins of a country clamoring for change following mass protests in 2019 — which he supported — against deep-rooted inequality in income, healthcare, education and pensions.
The protests, which left dozens dead and hundreds injured, were the catalyst for a process now under way to rewrite Chile’s dictatorship-era constitution.
Boric has vowed to relegate “to the grave” Chile’s neoliberal economic model, which dates from the era of military despot Pinochet, and is widely seen as sidelining poor people and working classes.
One percent of Chile’s population owns about one-quarter of its wealth.
Despite concern over his Frente Amplio’s (“Broad Front”) political alliance with the Communist Party of Chile in a country that traditionally votes for the center, Boric won a surprise runaway election victory in December last year.
He succeeded in mobilizing women and the youth, with a record voter turnout giving him nearly 56 percent of the vote to beat far-right Pinochet apologist Jose Antonio Kast.
The men, polar opposite political outsiders, had polled neck-and-neck ahead of the vote.
As the stock exchange dropped on news of Boric’s victory, he vowed in his first official address to “expand social rights” in Chile, but to do so with “fiscal responsibility.”
Boric took the oath Friday in Valparaiso, the seat of Chilean Congress, in a suit but no tie, appearing to hold back tears of emotion as he received the presidential sash from predecessor Sebastian Pinera.
Boric has promised to introduce a European-style social democracy to Chile, boosting taxes to pay for social reform, all while putting the brakes on spiraling debt.
He is to tackle these challenges with a Cabinet comprised mainly of women and young people — their average age is 42.
The team includes two comrades with whom Boric, as a student, led countrywide protests in 2011 for free, quality education.
Boric’s defense minister is Maya Fernandez, the granddaughter of Allende, Latin America’s first elected Marxist president, who was ousted in Pinochet’s 1973 coup d’etat.
Six Cabinet members were born, lived or studied in exile during the Pinochet years.
Analysts say Boric’s daunting task would be complicated by a Congress just about equally split between left and right-wing parties.
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