In a historic victory, a one-time leftist student leader and progressive legislator, Gabriel Boric, won Chile’s Dec. 19 presidential election. After decisively winning a runoff election against right-wing opponent Jose Antonio Kast, the 35-year-old will become Chile’s youngest president and most progressive leader since a U.S.-backed military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the government of Salvador Allende in 1973.
Boric rose to national prominence during massive protests in October 2019, when initial widespread anger at transit fare increases escalated into demands to repair Chile’s privatized pension and healthcare system — and a democratic process to re-write the Pinochet-era constitution.
Between The Line’s Scott Harris spoke with René Rojas, assistant professor in human development at the College of Community and Public Affairs, Binghamton University, who assesses the major challenges that president-elect Boric will face, including a divided Congress and guiding the constitutional process when he takes office on March 11.
RENÉ ROJAS: Gabriel Boric is a leader and as such, he represents a new left that has emerged in Chile over the last 10 to 15 years or so. He was a key leader of a really massive student movement that activated and mobilized 10 years ago, exactly.
He represents a new kind of movement and new demands for reform from the left as a left opposition that opposed the center left in government because the center left in Chile —since the restoration of democracy in 1990 — governed basically on a neoliberal platform.
This new left that emerged out of mass mobilizations like the student movement of 2011, 2012 and others emerged as a new political force wanting reforms that decommodified basic elements of social provision that raised the, for instance, tax rate on the wealthy that would invest more in public education and the public health care system, that would reform the privatized pension system and a series of other reforms that popular movements have been demanding for about 10 and 15 years.
SCOTT HARRIS: Professor Rojas, what is Gabriel Boric’s responsibility now as president in terms of shepherding through the changes to the Chilean constitution that are in process right now with a constituent assembly? What are his big challenges as he faces a divided Congress?
RENÉ ROJAS: He’s in a really tough situation, and in many ways it’s hard to think of him having straightforward success in terms of getting his policy platform, his proposals ratified in Congress. As you mentioned, there’s a divided Congress or there will be, as there has been, with one slight difference this time around. As an outcome of the elections in November of 2021, the right-wing actually improved its position in the lower House and in the Senate, so they actually can block any reform proposals coming out of the executive that Boric and his Cabinet will present.
And so what should he be fighting for given that any real success in terms of passing his program is going to be blocked by a revamped, in many ways and much more aggressive right-wing in Parliament. You know, it’s going to be tough.
He has to deliver, obviously on some direct material reforms around pensions, around the minimum wage and a few other things that really were the grievances behind the rebellion. It’s going to be tough. He’s got to somehow cobble together enough votes in Parliament to deliver on some of these.
In my opinion, what will be his largest, his most important responsibility as president will be to once again revitalize the work of the constituent assembly. After the delegates were elected in May of last year and after the constituent assembly began operating in July of this year, it really lost the initiative and it lost a lot of credibility.
One of the reasons that the constituent assembly lost credibility was because most visible elements of its left-wing really did not perform as they should have. They didn’t really take the core grievances, the core demands of the rebellion and fight as coherently as they should have around these. One of the things that Boric has to do, one of his main political tasks right now, will be to somehow restore the initiative that the constituent assembly had and make that one of the key arenas of political struggles in Chile, so that hand-in-hand with his government, he can claim that he accompanied, if you will or he supported this process within the Constituent Assembly, to bury the Constitution from the dictatorship and usher in a new charter that guarantees some basic social rights that Chileans have not enjoyed since the neoliberal revolution of the ’70 and ’80s.
