Chile Elections 2021: Who is Gabriel Boric, the former student leader who seeks to end neoliberalism

Toiled in the student struggles and later became a deputy, the leftist Gabriel Boric At only 35 years old, he is the youngest candidate of all those who aspire to the Presidency of Chile and the one that best embodies the generational change demanded in the massive protests of 2019.

Ecologist, feminist, regionalist and staunch critic of the neoliberal model installed during the military dictatorship (1973-1990) and later consolidated in the transition, it is also the one that possibly offers the most profound agenda of changes.

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Its objective is to combat the endemic inequality that suffers Chile and that two years ago detonated the so-called social explosion and the construction of a welfare state similar to the European democracies.

“If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism in Latin America, it will also be its grave,” Boric said last July, when he was proclaimed the standard-bearer of the leftist bloc Approve Dignity, made up of the Broad Front and the Communist Party.

CLOSE TO PODEMOS AND MUJICA

Boric He is one of the great favorites to go to the December 19 ballot, in which he would fight with the far-right José Antonio Kast, according to the latest polls.

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To come to power, would head the most leftist government since the socialist Salvador Allende, whom he always mentions as a reference. He is also very close to Pablo Iglesias and Íñigo Errejón, founders of the Spanish Podemos party, and former Uruguayan president José Mujica.

The Chilean presidential candidate for the left-wing I Approve Dignity party, Gabriel Boric, gestures during an interview with AFP in Santiago, on October 28, 2021. (MARTIN BERNETTI / AFP).

The markets fear him, although his current discourse is light years away from the radical proclamations he defended a decade ago when he was a law student and was at the head of the powerful Federation of Students of the University of Chile (FECH), an organization that led the 2006 and 2011 marches in favor of free education.

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His closest circle comes precisely from those mobilizations: his right hand is also deputy Giorgio Jackson, with whom he first came to Parliament in 2014 and founded the Broad Front three years later.

Since the presidential charter of I approve of Dignity In a vote in which he defeated Daniel Jadue, a heavyweight of communism, against all odds, he has considerably moderated his speech and is trying to dispute the center-left voters with the Christian Democrat Yasna Provoste (third in the polls).

When his critics blurt out that an eventual government of his would bring more instability because it would scare away investment, he usually responds with the same idea: “Instability is to stay the same, is to maintain the status quo.”

Gabriel Boric shows one of his tattoos during an interview with AFP in Santiago, on October 28, 2021. (MARTIN BERNETTI / AFP).

DISCREPANCIES WITH THE COMMUNISTS

Born in the southern Punta Arenas in 1986, Boric has been the target of attacks for his youth and inexperience outside of politics and also for his alliance with the communists, with whom he has acknowledged having differences, especially with regard to the political situation in Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba.

“In our government, the commitment to democracy and human rights will be total, without endorsements of any kind for dictatorships and autocracies, whoever bothers”, he said last week after a faction of the Communist Party issued a statement supporting Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega after the fraudulent elections in that country.

The more traditional right calls him “extreme left” and he often repeatedly criticizes the meeting he held in 2018 with Ricardo Palma Salamanca, convicted of the murder of former conservative senator Jaime Guzmán, ideologist of the current Constitution, inherited from the dictatorship.

Despite being the leader closest to the outbreak and one of the greatest defenders of the constituent process in which Chile is immersed, it has been losing support among the most radical protesters.

The agreement with most of the parliamentary forces in November 2019 to convene a plebiscite on the Constitution, at the height of the violent peak of the crisis, was the breaking point with the so-called “front line”, the protesters who were directly confronted with police.

Many saw him then as a traitor (among them some communists), while for many others he showed a sense of state and having left behind his student radicalism.

In 2018 he made public that he suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and during the pandemic he emerged as one of the great defenders of mental health.

His final stretch of the campaign has been complicated: he was infected with covid-19 and was in quarantine for almost a week. She was also somewhat clouded by an old complaint against her for alleged sexual harassment.

“There is no (judicial) accusation presented today, but I am fully available to any type of investigation (…) It is not enough that only I affirm my innocence, all guarantees must be given to the victims”he said in the last television debate.

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