SANTIAGO — Leftist ex-student activist Gabriel Boric was sworn in Friday as Chile’s youngest-ever president and hailed the country’s Marxist former leader Salvador Allende in his inaugural address to the nation.
Standing in front of tens of thousands of supporters at La Moneda Palace in the capital Santiago, the 36-year-old said Allende — who killed himself in 1973 after Augusto Pinochet’s coup — had foreseen this moment.
“As Salvador Allende predicted almost 50 years ago, we are again compatriots, opening up great avenues where free men and women will pass to build a better society. We go on! Long live Chile!” he said.
“We would not be here without your mobilizations,” the new president said to the crowd, who chanted “Boric, friend, the people are with you!”
Boric, who plans to turn Chile into a greener, more egalitarian “welfare state,” takes over the reins of a country clamoring for change following mass protests in 2019 — which he supported — against deep-rooted inequality in income, healthcare, education, and pensions.
The protests, which left dozens dead and hundreds injured, were the catalyst for a process now under way to rewrite Chile’s dictatorship-era constitution.
Boric has vowed to relegate “to the grave” Chile’s neoliberal economic model, which dates from the era of military despot Pinochet and is widely seen as sidelining the poor and working classes.
One percent of Chile’s population owns about a quarter of its wealth.
Despite concern over his Frente Amplio (Broad Front)’s political alliance with the Communist Party in a country that traditionally votes for the center, Boric won a surprise runaway election victory last December.
He succeeded in mobilizing women and the youth, with a record voter turnout giving him nearly 56 percent of the vote to beat far-right Pinochet apologist Jose Antonio Kast.
The men, polar opposite political outsiders, had polled neck-and-neck ahead of the vote.
As the stock exchange dropped on news of Boric’s victory, he vowed in his first official address to “expand social rights” in Chile, but to do so with “fiscal responsibility.”
Boric took the oath Friday in Valparaiso, the seat of Congress, in a suit but no tie, appearing to hold back tears of emotion as he received the presidential sash from predecessor Sebastian Pinera.
He expressed a “great sense of responsibility and duty to the people” of Chile.
“We will do our best to rise to the challenges we face as a country,” the new president said.
“Hope for the people,” read a placard borne by Maritza Lopez, a 62-year-old housewife who made the trip to Valparaiso from Coronel, hundreds of kilometers away.
A lawmaker since 2014, millennial Boric inherits an economy ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic.
Much of 2021’s GDP growth was fueled by temporary pandemic grants and stop-gap withdrawals allowed from private pension funds.
The central bank has been hiking interest rates to curb inflation.
Pinera finishes his term with a disapproval rating of 71 percent, the worst recorded by a president since the return of democracy in 1990.
Boric has promised to introduce a European-style social democracy to Chile, boosting taxes to pay for social reform, all while putting the brakes on spiralling debt.
He will tackle these challenges with a cabinet comprised mainly of women and young people — their average age is 42.
The team includes two comrades with whom Boric, as a student, led countrywide protests in 2011 for free, quality education.
Boric’s defense minister is Maya Fernandez, the granddaughter of Allende, Latin America’s first elected Marxist president, who was ousted in Pinochet’s 1973 coup d’etat.
Six cabinet members were born, lived or studied in exile during the Pinochet years.
Analysts say Boric’s daunting task will be complicated by a Congress just about equally split between left- and right-wing parties.
This means that much negotiation and compromise will be required to pass laws to bring his plans to fruition.
“This is a government that comes to power in a very fragmented political climate, which does not have a parliamentary majority and therefore cannot make very radical reforms in the short term,” political analyst Claudia Heiss of the University of Chile told AFP.
The new president’s Broad Front party has never been in government.
More than 20 international guests attended the investiture ceremony, including the presidents of Uruguay, Argentina and Peru, King Felipe VI of Spain, and Colombian presidential hopeful Gustavo Petro.
Also in the audience was university student Gustavo Gatica, who lost his vision when he was injured by rubber bullets during the 2019 protests.
