Page 6 - MONTT LATIN AMERICAN MAGAZINE, DECEMBER, 2021

Chile, An Unexpected President
A 35-year-old millennial, who leaps from the Law School of the University of Chile directly to Congress with an audacious project that
seeks to bury the free market model, has become the most unlikely president of Chile, who promises to change the country where “ consumer goods become social rights regardless of the size of the wallet ”.
Frente Amplio is a party created in 2017; it has little experience and, therefore, lacks relevant figures, with political weight, with history. That was one of the reasons why Gabriel Boric Font was urged by his co-religionists to become a presidential candidate to confront the candidate of the Communist Party, Daniel Jadue in the primaries of the I Approve Dignity coalition. He was the only one who gave them the confidence to represent them. His first reaction was to reject the offer, because something like that did not interest him. “I lack a lot of experience,” he said, “I have to learn, I need knowledge of the State.”
But, finally, he was forced by circumstances and, almost without looking for it, ended up displacing his opponent, considered by the Communist Party (PC) as the best offer of that community in 110 years of life, in an impressive vote, where the current President- elect obtained more than one million votes. Then came the confrontation with the conservative presidential candidate José Antonio Kast and then a landslide victory in the second round, where he obtained more than 55 percent of the vote. Thus, citizens chose a left-wing government after almost half a century with the highest level of participation since 2012 when the law that established mandatory voting was repealed. The current Director of the Doctorate in
Higher Education at the Universidad del Desarrollo, Joaquín Brunner highlights that: “The ongoing change in the political elite is, without a doubt, the most important process of transformation of Chilean society in our present journey century”.
And this led by a young man who will assume power at the age of 36, the son of Enap’s engineer, Luis Boic, a member of the Christian Democracy of María Soledad Font. He is the eldest of three siblings, with a paternal family descendants of Croatian immigrants who, at the end of the 19th century, entered Patagonia in search of gold and Catalans from his mother.
Agnostic, single, despite the fact that his father is DC, he was always oriented towards socialism, as he confessed, in a relationship for three years with a member of his Social Convergence party, descendant of Greek immigrants, the anthropologist Irina Karamanos. Very studious, with a 6.2 average after leaving the British school in Punta Arenas, he graduated from the School of Law at the University of Chile, but did not graduate and from there went straight to Congress.
He participated in secondary federations in Punta Arenas. He held various student leadership positions jumping to the national arena as president of the Center for Law Students from where he led a 44-day seizure
that ended with the departure of Dean Roberto Nahum.
He was president of the Federation of Students of the University of Chile (Fech), in 2012. He came to office in the second year of student mobilizations, where he defeated Camila Vallejo (PC), who was going to re- election after leading the protests in 2011 with Giorgio Jackson. Deputy for Magallanes since 2013 and 2017.
His student role allowed him to achieve high adherence in his first deputy election in 2013 (26.6 percent), which he achieved by competing with the New Majority. He increased the vote for him in his re-election in 2017 (32.8 percent), the second national majority, the year in which he was placed several times among the three best- evaluated politicians in the CEP survey.
He was sworn in in 2014 without a tie and wearing a beige chiffon jacket that drew the attention of old-guard MPs. Together with Giorgio Jackson, he formed the Frente Amplio in 2017, which broke into Congress by electing 20 deputies thanks to the presidential candidacy of Beatriz Sánchez. He had a role in the social outbreak of October 18 in Plaza Baquedano and rebuked in an uncontrolled tone the soldiers who were guarding the place, surrounded by acts of violence. He explained that he wanted to oppose the “militarization” of the city.