Four months ago, 35-year-old Gabriel Boric confounded the polls to claim victory in a presidential primary he had barely been old enough to compete in. But on 11 March next year, he will now be sworn in as Chile’s youngest ever president – having amassed more votes than any presidential candidate in history.
Boric is the driving force behind Chile’s abrupt changing of the guard. He belongs to a radical generation of student leaders who are grimly determined to bury dictator Augusto Pinochet’s bitter legacy once and for all.
“Chile was the birthplace of neoliberalism, and it shall also be its grave!” he shouted from a stage the night of his primary win, his forearm tattoo peeking out from beneath a rolled-up sleeve.
General Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship bestowed Chile with its extreme economic model, and Boric and his influential cohort of student leaders have taken it upon themselves to dispose of it.
“I know that history doesn’t begin with us,” he declared on stage on Sunday night as president-elect before a baying crowd.
“I feel like an inheritor of the long trajectory of those who, from different places, have tirelessly sought social justice.”
Boric was born in Punta Arenas in 1986 and is fiercely proud of his home region, Magallanes, below the Patagonian ice fields.
In 2011, as he entered the final year of his law degree, Boric became a leader of education protests across the country, in which thousands of students took over their campuses and faculties across a long, cold winter, spilling out into the streets to demand free, high-quality education for all.
The protests were quelled with a modest compromise, allowing some students to study for free. Several of the movement’s young leaders later ran for office and joined the country’s congress or took up positions in local government.
Boric never completed his degree, instead winning election to Chile’s congress in 2013 and serving two terms as a deputy, becoming one of the first congresspeople to come from beyond Chile’s two traditional coalitions in the process.
But since narrowly losing the presidential first round to José Antonio Kast, a far-right supporter of General Pinochet, he has moderated his programme markedly, appealing to the centrist voters who have now propelled him into La Moneda.
Unlike his firebrand days at the front of the marches, Boric is now neatly groomed, humble and serious – while he often wears a smart blazer covering his tattoos. His girlfriend Irina Karamanos joined him on stage on Sunday night after the results.
He has pledged to decentralise Chile, implement a welfare state, increase public spending and include women, non-binary Chileans and Indigenous peoples like never before. But it is Boric’s ultimate goal of extricating the country from the binds of Pinochet’s dictatorship that will define his legacy.
The next four years will see this process begin, as the 2011 student generation led by Boric, take on an even more important role than before.
