24hoursworld

The young militant who promises to open the doors of La Moneda to the demands of the riots

Boric, for whom “the country brings out the best in itself when we are united,” will lead a nation that drafts its new Constitution in a Constituent Convention, emanating from the social protests of October 2019.

It will also have to deal with the economic crisis derived from sanitary restrictions due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“I realized that for Gabriel this was an apostolate and I stopped fighting. This for me is stepping on stones all the time; I wanted a more comfortable, more classical life (for him) ”, says his mother, María Soledad Font, from her native Punta Arenas, some 3,000 km south of Santiago.

She did not want Boric to enter politics, but the wall of her old bedroom already showed a young man focused on her: “Let’s face it, let’s do the impossible” or “reason is strength”, it still reads on the walls of the room on the second floor of her parents’ house.

“We are the heirs of those who have fought to make Chile a more just and dignified country,” he alleged in his campaign closing speech, during which he proposed a country focused on improving the basic rights of a population that suffers from serious inequality. after following for 31 years the neoliberal model imposed during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).

Although he says that he has “much to learn”, he assures that he wants to draw on the “experience” of ex-presidents whom he criticized 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.

Change

Boric is not afraid to change course. During the almost seven months of the campaign he 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.

“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,” said his brother Simón Boric, a 33-year-old journalist.

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

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.

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 burst 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.

He has said that, as 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.

Source From: Ambito

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Latest Posts