With the election of the leftist Gabriel Boric, 35, who defeated his far-right rival in the presidential ballot by a historic 11 points, Chile opted on Sunday to change the model towards a welfare state and ensure the advancement of the new Constitution being written.
The former Chilean ambassador to Panama, Francisco Cruz, explained that Chile has had a voluntary participation system for years, in which not only those who are registered in the parties participate but also those who want to do so, since registration is automatic, which that makes the registry mobilize with incentives other than the traditional ones in politics or those that were used in the last 30 years.
He mentioned that this is the second presidential election that is governed by this type of rule.
He considered these elections as an intense day. “The tables closed at 6:00 pm and around 7:30 pm the trend was clear with a little more than 50% of the tables scrutinized, and before 9:00 pm the speech of respective proclamation ”, he commented.
According to the lawyer, Boric represents in some way, a different policy option, since Chilean politics has always been divided into two blocks: “the Concertación or New Majority founded by Ricardo Lagos, Michelle Bachelet, and what was Alianza por Chile, and what happens is that a new political reference is set up inspired by the broad front compared to sectors that come from the mobilization and the student marches of 2008-2009, what was called the Penguin student revolution ”.
Among the challenges that Chile’s youngest president must face are two fundamental challenges: “In the local case, it is to administer a congress that is protected between the opposition and the left-wing parties, consequently, there is no congress. in favor. It will have a third to veto insanity and two-thirds to administer sanity and impose certain agreements, so the first thing is how to manage a congress to give governance to its own programmatic offer. The second thing is to manage the moderation of their own sector, this was the election, perhaps the most polarized of the last 30 years, “said Cruz.
At 99.9% of the votes counted, Boric won with 55.87% over the far-right lawyer José Antonio Kast (44.13%), 55, who recognized his defeat early and offered to “be a contribution to the homeland “during the government of his rival.
Boric came to the presidency as a candidate for the I Approve Dignity pact, made up of the Broad Front and the Communist Party.
In his first activity as president-elect, Boric will meet this Monday with the current president Sebastián Piñera at the La Moneda palace.
