Chile is posited to be helmed by its youngest President. With Gabriel Boric’s election, Chile expands the concert of countries with young Heads of State, pre-eminently Finland, Kosovo, Georgia, El Salvador, Costa Rica, New Zealand, Ireland and France, the last named being a country where Emmanuel Macron assumed office as the country’s youngest President in 2017 at the age of 39.
No less crucially, last Sunday registered a convincing vote for the Left in the Latin American nation. At 35, Mr Boric will be Chile’s youngest leader and arguably its most liberal since President Salvador Allende, who died ~ reports claim that he committed suicide ~ in the wake of the coup in 1973.
Mr Boric has pledged to put in place an inclusive government, led by the youth, to counter poverty and inequality ~ “the unacceptable underbelly of a free market model” introduced decades ago by the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. It is pretty obvious that Mr Boric has been able to influence the electorate quite substantially.
Having won 56 per cent of the vote, Mr Boric was able to defeat his opponent, the far-right lawmaker, Jose Antonio Kast, by more than ten percentage points. As he told his spirited supporters in the capital, Santiago, in the immediate aftermath of his victory: “We are a generation that has emerged in public life demanding that our rights be respected as rights and not treated like consumer goods. There continues to be justice for the rich and injustice for the poor, and we no longer will permit that the poor (to) keep paying the price of Chile’s inequality”.
He underlined the claim that “progressive positions had launched his improbable campaign”, notably the pledge to fight climate change by blocking a proposed mining project in the “world’s largest copper-producing nation”. Quite the most ambitious goalpost is his agenda to introduce a European-style social democracy that will expand economic and political rights in an essay towards countering inequality.
As the candidate of Approve Dignity, well and truly can it be said that the dignity of the youth, preeminently that of Mr Boric has been approved by the voters. He has assured the electorate that he will be the President of “all Chileans” and will do his best to tackle any challenges, chief among these being the coronavirus pandemic.
“Approve Dignity” is a coalition of the Broad Front, in itself a coalition, and the Communist Party of Chile. Going by the estimates of the United Nations, Chile confronts one of the world’s largest income gaps, with one per cent of the population owning 25 per cent of the country’s wealth.
It bears recall that as a former student leader, Mr Boric had backed the mass protests against inequality and corruption that had convulsed Chile in 2019 and 2020. The country is on the turn ~ from a far-right President to a leftist who represents the youth. Yet another Latin American experiment is set to unfold.