December 20 (THEWILL) – Chile has elected 35-year-old Gabriel Boric as its new president, making him the youngest person elected president in the country’s history.
Boric, a left-wing legislator rose to prominence during anti-government protests in the country.
“I am going to be the president of all Chileans. I am going to do my best to get on top of this tremendous challenge. I will be the president of all Chileans”, Boric said in the brief televised appearance with outgoing President Sebastián Piñera.
His opponent, right-wing candidate José Antonio Kast, conceded 90 minutes after the polls closed and half of the ballots had been counted.
While Boric and Kast ran on vastly different platforms, both men belong to political parties that have never been represented in Chile’s government.
Kast congratulated Boric and said on Twitter, “from now on, he is the president elect of Chile and deserves all our respect and constructive collaboration.”
A native of Punta Arenas, in Chile’s far south, Boric as a student led the Federation of Students at the University of Chile in Santiago.
He rose to prominence leading protests in 2011 demanding improved and cheaper education.
By 2014, still in his 20s, he had joined the national congress as a lower-house legislator, representing Chile’s vast and sparsely populated southernmost region of Magallanes.
Boric, who will take office in March, has tapped into public anger at Chile’s market-oriented economic model, widely considered to have helped drive decades of rapid economic growth but stoking inequality.
He incorporated promises of radical reforms on inequality into his platform, including raising taxes on the rich, expanding the country’s social safety net, creating a greener economy, and drafting a new Constitution.
On the campaign trail this year, he promised to “bury” the neoliberal economic model left by General Augusto Pinochet.
