3 milestones of Gabriel Boric’s electoral triumph in Chile (apart from his age)

Gabriel Boric will go down in the history of Chile for some milestones that marked his triumph in Sunday’s ballot, starting with his age: at 35, he is the youngest president-elect his country has ever had.

When the leftist begins his term on March 11, 2022, he will have turned 36 the previous month, but he will be one month younger than Manuel Blanco Encalada when he assumed in 1826 as the first Chilean president and the youngest so far.

Boric He will also be at that time half of the 72 years of age that the current president of Chile adds, Sebastian Piñera.

But there are other important milestones left by the victory of this former student leader over the right-wing candidate José Antonio Kast.

Here three of them:

1. The most voted president

Boric became the president with the highest number of votes received in the history of Chile: more than 4.6 million when practically all the tables had been scrutinized (99.86%).

The candidate of the left-wing alliance I Approve Dignity thus surpassed the flow of four million votes that the former president had achieved Eduardo Frei in 1993 and that they made him the most voted in his country so far.

However, Frei garnered that time a higher percentage of the total votes than Boric: 57.9% versus 55.9% respectively.

But there is another important difference: while Frei obtained that support when suffrage in Chile was mandatory, Boric did so with a voluntary vote.

In addition, Sunday’s ballot had the highest voter turnout registered in Chile with a voluntary vote, with 55.5% of the electoral roll, 8.3 million votes.

All this “undoubtedly gives greater legitimacy” to Boric’s presidential term, says Guillermo Holzmann, a Chilean political analyst and professor at the University of Valparaíso, to BBC Mundo.

2. An unprecedented comeback

Boric also achieved something that no other candidate in Chile had achieved since the return of democracy in 1990: winning a ballot after coming second in the first round.

In fact, in the November vote, Kast had outperformed Boric by more than two percentage points.

Experts point out that for this unprecedented comeback in Chile, the increase in participation was key, since in November the majority of voters stayed at home and only voted 47.3%.

But it must also be remembered that in the first round no candidate exceeded 30% of the votes, something unprecedented, Holzmann warns.

Boric reversed the result “because a good number of people went out to vote, making the decision at the last minute,” explains the analyst.

3. The end of an era of parties

The election that ended on Sunday also marked the end of the political dominance exercised in Chile by the two great blocks of the center-left and center-right since the return of democracy in 1990.

Boric is the first elected president in this Chilean era outside of those blocks: Approve Dignity was an alliance between the Broad Front, a left-wing coalition founded in 2017, and the Communist Party.

In addition to opposing the right wing of Piñera and Kast, Boric has been critical of the center-left Concertación that ruled Chile between 1990 and 2010, made up of the Socialist Party and the Christian Democrats.

And his message of change managed to tune in with a wide sector of Chilean society disenchanted with traditional parties, especially since the social outbreak of 2019.

“Today the old man’s parties went into retirement establishment, and the formation of the new set of parties begins that recovers confidence in politics, with more than 8 million voters, “Chilean political analyst and pollster Marta Lagos tweeted early this Monday.

Holzmann assures that Boric managed to capture “a pragmatic vote that wants a change and transformation.”

“This is a criticism of the power structure that exists in Chile,” he explains, “but it does not mean that all that vote is from the left.”

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