By John Ikani
Gabriel Boric Font, a 36-year-old leftist politician, was inaugurated on Friday as Chile’s new president, the youngest to hold the office, for the period between 2022-2026.
At the Congress building in the port city of Valparaiso, Boric on Friday took the presidential sash from outgoing billionaire President Sebastian Pinera.
The Socialist Party leader of the Senate, Älvaro Elizalde, draped the presidential sash over Boric’s shoulders during the ceremony in the legislative chambers in the port city of Valparaiso. Soon afterward, Boric swore in the leader of what he has called a “feminist” Cabinet — which includes 14 women and 10 men.
Ostentatiously informal, the bearded young leader declined to wear a tie for the inauguration.
“We come to give ourselves body and soul to making life better in our country,” he said in a speech from a balcony of the government building, calling for unity to make Chile “a dignified and just country.”
“The road will undoubtedly be long and difficult,” he said.
At 36, Boric was only 4 years old when democracy returned to the South American nation following a 17-year military dictatorship that both bloodied and set the groundwork for modern Chile.
Boric has vowed that his young, inclusive government will attack poverty and inequality that he said are the unacceptable underbelly of a free-market model imposed decades ago by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who ruled from 1973-90.
The Young President is taking over a country seeking change following mass 2019 protests, which he supported, against deep-rooted inequality in income, healthcare, education and pensions.
Boric is also taking office at a moment when large-scale immigration from Venezuela and other countries has caused unrest in northern Chile while violent protests by some Indigenous rights activists demanding historic territories have caused clashes in the south.
It’s also a moment of international turmoil due to fallout from the coronavirus pandemic and the conflict in Ukraine.
His administration will oversee a referendum on a new Chilean constitution, which an elected, constituent assembly is currently rewriting to replace the Magna Carta put in place by Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.
Boric won 56% of the vote in a December runoff against conservative José Antonio Kast.
While his election initially scared investors, causing drops in stock prices and the peso, he has since stressed a pragmatic streak, vowing to maintain fiscal responsibility and naming a respected economist, former Central Bank president Mario Marcel, as finance minister.
“We are going to have to make the changes step by step because if not, the risk of falling back is too great,” he said recently — a stance that may be enforced by the fact his leftist coalition has only 37 of the 155 seats in congress. Even adding other center-left parties, his allies fall just short of a majority.
Chile has long been seen as one of Latin America’s greatest economic success stories, bolstered in part by its vast mineral industries. But it has been rocked over the past decade by repeated large protest movements — some led by Boric — demanding better education, pensions and health care, as well as a more egalitarian distribution of wealth.
