Who is Gabriel Boric, the student leader who is one step away from becoming the youngest president of Chile

The Chilean leftist deputy Gabriel Boric he flatly ruled out a presidential candidacy a little over a year ago. He acknowledged lacking “the necessary experience.” But this Sunday he will contest the presidential ballot backed by the entire Chilean left.

LOOK: Follow LIVE the polarized second round of the elections in Chile between Gabriel Boric and José Antonio Kast

“We want to move towards a welfare state. The title that they put does not concern me. If he is a social democrat, in good time ”, he claimed Boric on Tuesday in his last debate against his rival from extremaderecha, Jose Antonio Kast, at the end of a campaign focused on controversies and accusations rather than on the candidates’ programs.

At 35 years of age, the minimum age to run for the presidency of Chile, Boric He left behind the fears expressed in September 2020 and last May he began to collect signatures to register his presidential candidacy and compete in the primaries of the “I approve dignity” coalition, which brings together the Broad Front and the Communist Party.

LOOK: Boric vs. Kast: who won the last debate and how to triumph in the battle for the undecided in Chile?

Surprisingly, he won the communist candidate Daniel Jadue, favorite in the polls, and in the first round of November 21, he got second place with 25.8% of the votes.

However, his rival Kast, as well as the right-wing militancy and part of the Christian Democrats, has incessantly expressed their fear that Boric will impose the vision of the Communist Party, one of the parties that makes up the left-wing coalition that supports Boric. “We don’t want it to be like Cuba or Venezuela,” Kast has repeated.

• Neither Kast nor Boric: a Chile caught between two “extremes”
• “Chile is not and will never be a Marxist or communist country,” says candidate Kast during the closing of the campaign
• Kast “is only going to bring instability, more hatred and violence” to Chile, says Boric during the closing of the campaign

Start from behind

Although he says that he has “much to learn”, he assures that he wants to draw on the “experience” of former leaders whom he criticized so much when he was a student leader and deputy, among them the socialists Ricardo Lagos (2000-2006) and Michelle Bachelet ( 2006-2010; 2014-2018). Both gave him a seamless accolade in recent weeks.

Boric not afraid to change course. In these almost seven months of campaigning, he has modified his speech as a rebellious boy who led the student protests of 2011 demanding “free, quality public education”, to that of a social democrat.

LOOK: Second round in Chile: “This is the most polarized election since Allende won” | Interview

“I would say that his honesty and transparency, his openness to dialogue, are two of Gabriel’s greatest virtues, and that in a next president for Chile is crucial”His brother Simón Boric, a 33-year-old journalist, highlighted in statements to AFP.

His political transformation goes hand in hand with a change in appearance.

LOOK: This was the last presidential debate between Boric and Kast less than a week before the second round in Chile

Little remains of the bearded and disheveled young man who led the Federation of Students of the University of Chile (FECH) and who in 2014, when he was 27 years old, assumed a first term as a deputy. Today he wears a jacket and shirt, with shorter hair, a neat beard and glasses.

“We did it when we fought for education, and they didn’t believe us. We did it when we broke the binominal (old electoral system), with the signature board (to present its candidacy), with the primaries and I have no doubt that we are going to do it for the second round with unity, “he said in his speech after knowing the results of the first round.

Gabriel Boric. (AFP).

Guarantee rights

Boric was born in the southern city of Punta Arenas, 3,000 km south of Santiago, into a middle-class family of Croatian and Catalan great-grandparents. He is the oldest of three siblings and emigrated to Santiago to study law at the University of Chile, but has not yet graduated.

In the ballot campaign, he asked that “hope beat fear” in the face of criticism that branded him “extreme” for his alliance with the communists.

Avid reader, says poetry and history relaxes him.

Single and without children, he has been in a relationship with the political scientist Irina Karamanos for almost three years.

His detractors reproach him for his lack of experience to lead a government and his more extreme positions of the past, for which he has apologized or has declared that they were a mistake.

“Our generation bursts into politics in 2011 throwing away a bit of the fears that the dictatorship and the transition pacts had generated,” he said in an interview with AFP before the first round.

He thus alluded to the Concertación, a center-left coalition that since 1990 governed a good part of the 31 years of democracy, and that today lies disintegrated and discredited as a reflection of the great crisis of institutional confidence, but that in the second round stood behind the your figure.

If he becomes president, he wants to “ensure a welfare state so that everyone has the same rights, no matter how much money they have in their wallet.”

“If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism in Latin America, it will also be its grave,” he said in his proclamation as a candidate.

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