Chile elections 2021: Gabriel Boric says he hopes to be “the president of all Chileans”

The former student leader of the left Gabriel Boric, which faces in the elections this Sunday for the Presidency of Chile to the ultraconservative Jose Antonio KastHe affirmed that he hopes to be “the president of all Chileans” if he wins at the polls.

“The sense of historical responsibility is tremendous, I know that history does not start with us and that we are standing on the shoulders of giants. I hope I can be everyone’s president ”, The candidate, leader of a coalition between the Broad Front and the Communist Party, said after casting his vote.

Boric, 35 – the minimum age to run for office – added that the new generations “enter politics with clean hands, with warm hearts and cool heads.”

“We are certain that a Chile more humane and more dignified, a more egalitarian Chile. And to that we are going to dedicate all our efforts from where we have to be ”, added.

Defender of a welfare state with a feminist and environmentalist accent, and akin to the massive protests for equality in 2019, Boric would be the winner of the ballot, according to the latest polls.

Behind it is located closet, a fervent 55-year-old Catholic who seeks to maintain the current neoliberal model with slight changes, lower taxes, tackle irregular migration with a heavy hand and is against gay marriage and all forms of abortion.

It is the most polarized and decisive election since the return to democracy in 1990, with two candidates bringing more drastic proposals than those of the large center-right and center-left blocs that have been sharing power for three decades.

Boric, whose coalition emerged in 2017 as a renewed left and similar to that of Podemos in Spain, made a call to go to the polls and emphasized that it will respect the results “without installing blankets of smoke.”

“Whoever wins and whoever loses must understand that democracy is more important than me or Kast. If we have to lose we will recognize it ”, He said.

Experts affirm that the outlook is very uncertain and that the result could be defined “vote by vote”, taking into account that in the first round it only differed two percentage points (Kast obtained 27.9% support and Boric 25, 8%).

To this is added that a large number of voters remained undecided according to the latest polls (one in four, according to the pollster Cadem) and the uncertainty about participation, since in the last vote only 47% of the voters went to the polls. electoral census.

The next president, who will take office in March 2022 for a period of four years, will be either the most leftist since Salvador Allende (1970-1973) or the most right-wing since Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).

Among its main challenges will be to channel the social crisis that is still in force since the 2019 protests; to lead the implementation of the norms of the new Constitution -in case they are approved in an exit plebiscite-, and to face the economic challenges left by the pandemic.

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