Chilean President Gabriel Boric leaves workplace this Wednesday, when he’ll hand the presidency to the far-right Jose Antonio Kast, who received final December’s presidential election on an agenda diametrically against what Boric stands for. The standard knowledge this week is that Boric—who defeated Kast in 2021 however was constitutionally prohibited from working for a second consecutive time period—was a failure as president: that his guarantees of progressive transformation got here to nothing and that Chileans corrected course by returning to the proper. That verdict is untimely. Arguably, we received’t know the true nature of Boric’s legacy for years to return.
When Boric took workplace in early 2022, he confronted excessive expectations at a tense second for Chile. The nation had been rocked by explosive protests on the finish of 2019, triggered by a metro fare hike in Santiago, the capital, however fueled by a long time of frustration with inequality, excessive price of dwelling and a structure written underneath the Pinochet dictatorship. A former scholar protest chief and longtime left-wing member of Congress, Boric’s election in 2021 was a product of the identical motion that drove the protests and calls for for constitutional reforms. At 35 years previous, he was additionally the youngest president in Chilean historical past, and he did nothing to mood expectations for his presidency, declaring on the marketing campaign path that “if Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it should even be its tomb.”
Upon taking workplace, Boric actively promoted a proposed new structure that was drafted by a constitutional conference dominated by the left. The doc represented a definitive break with Chile’s previous governance mannequin, however when it was put up for a referendum in September 2022, 62 p.c of Chileans rejected it as a result of they seen it as too left-wing.
