Editorial. Chile turned a page of its history on December 19th. By wearing Gabriel Boric to his presidency, a large majority that a first tight round won by the far-right candidate José Antonio Kast did not let guess, the Chileans chose to turn his back on a policy deemed responsible for profound inequalities , married with only a few nuances by the majorities of right as a left who have succeeded power since the end of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
The election of the former student leader from the far left, which will be at 36, in March, the youngest president of the country’s history, does not just mark a generation jump. Its victory feeds in South America, on the left, the hope of a renewal that would exceed the borders of Chile in 2022. Crucial elections are planned in May in Colombia and later in Brazil. They could result in the reflux of the hard right embodied by Ivan Duque like the still more extreme of Jair Bolsonaro, regardless of the political contortion of the latter.
The partial parliamentary elections in Argentina, in November, have highlighted the difficulties of the Péronist President of the left center Alberto Fernandez, whose party was preceded by the opposition of the right center. Latin America also has bastions of another left, authoritarian, dictatorial, Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela, which remains fairly compatible with the first.
The election of Gabriel Boric, at the end of a vote marked by strong participation in the Aune of Chile, constitutes above all the repudiation of a neoliberal economic model uninhibited, incarnated until the caricature by the President Outgoing Sebastian Piñera, whose mandate has been tainted by accusations of affairment. This “Chilean” model has spurned privately in the education and health sectors, generating a two-speed company that a capitalization pension system has frozen a little more.
Social fracture
He produced indisputable results in the growth of the gross domestic product, but at the price of a social fracture born in 2019 by a protesting bottom blade. This provided the popular base of the 19 December victory, sweeping the ultra-conservative, security and anti-immigration words of José Antonio Kast.
Gabriel Boric, whose family has Croatian roots, has been able to gather behind the different components of the Chilean left promising that his country would be the “tomb” of this neoliberalism. It will endeavor to return to the inequalities that afflict the country by a more equitable, redistributive taxation, and the return of the State, in a nutshell by a program that inspired, voluntarily or not, of what is already in force, and for a long time, within the European Union.
However, it will have to count with a strong right opposition in Parliament. It could force it to adjustments whose exercise of power is often synonymous. The new president has already promised dialogue, a necessity as much as an encouraging signal for Chile. This is all the more the case since the beginning of his mandate will also coincide with a major constitutional revision that could allow both to permanently bury the years of lead experienced by the country and to better take into account the whole Chilean minorities.