After winning a historic victory in Chile’s presidential runoff election, former Marxist student leader Gabriel Boric will face immediate pressure from his young fans to keep his pledges to rebuild the country.
Boric travelled across Chile for months, vowing to form a youth-led inclusive administration to combat the country’s persistent poverty and inequality, which he claims are the unacceptable underbelly of a free-market model, imposed decades ago by General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.
The audacity of the pledge paid off. Boric easily trounced his opponent, far-right congressman José Antonio Kast, with 56 percent of the vote on Sunday, becoming Chile’s youngest modern president at the age of 35.
Boric leaped atop a metal barricade to reach the stage in downtown Santiago, where he utilised the indigenous Mapuche language to begin a victory address to hundreds of primarily youthful followers.
‘We are a generation that emerged in public life demanding our rights be respected as rights and not treated like consumer goods or a business,’ Boric stated.
‘We know there continues to be justice for the rich, and justice for the poor, and we no longer will permit that the poor keep paying the price of Chile’s inequality,’ he added.
Post Your Comments