Former student protest leader and left-wing legislator Gabriel Boric defeated right-wing lawyer and former legislator José Antonio Kast in Chile’s presidential election on Sunday. Boric secured 56% of the votes to Kast’s 44, meaning that he will now replace outgoing President Sebastián Piñera in March; he will begin his four-year term following a three-month transition period. At 35, he will become Chile’s youngest-ever leader.
The importance of this election was not lost on citizens, with voter turnout recorded at 56%, the highest figure since 2012, when voting became no longer mandatory.
Kast, for his part, was gracious in defeat, following a highly polarising election, and congratulated Boric on his “grand triumph.” They sat together for a short meeting following the announcement of Boric’s victory and Kast later sent out a tweet saying that he hopes for “constructive collaboration,” given that his party holds 50 seats in the 155-seat lower house of Parliament.
Likewise, Piñera wished Boric success and said the incoming president will be tasked with uniting citizens following years of intense protests, that Boric has been a part of, in recent years. To this end, in a brief televised appearance with the outgoing president, Boric outlined that he will be a president “of all Chileans.”
Boric has been an outspoken critic of the country’s neoliberal, free-market economic model, which has driven growth but widened inequality. In this respect, he has vowed to raise taxes on the “super rich” and large corporations and to expand social services, tackle inequality, and improve environmental protections.
The left-wing legislator pledged to place women at the forefront of his revolution, and in his victory speech claimed that his government will “leave behind once and for all the patriarchal inheritance of our society.”
The Social Convergence party’s candidate also counted on the support of former president Michelle Bachelet, who is currently serving as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. After voting for Boric on Sunday, Bachelet said that “hope has to beat fear.”
Boric has been at the forefront of protests that erupted in 2019 and ultimately led to a referendum to rewrite the country’s Pinochet-era constitution. The referendum was passed with a 78% approval rate back in October 2020, and a committee to redraft the document will be led by an independent and opposition committee as per another vote in May of this year.
The push for a new constitution came following long-term protests against systemic inequality, corruption, and elitism. At various points over the past few years, tens of thousands of protestors have taken to the streets to demand the resignation of President Sebastián Piñera, and their resolve was only further hastened by the brutal response of security forces. In 2019, there were 30 deaths and thousands of injuries reported in anti-establishment protests.
The Republican Party’s 55-year-old Kast, meanwhile, is a devout Roman Catholic and father to nine children. This was his second attempt at office, having won less than 8% of votes in the first round of voting back in 2017. He has previously hailed Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, attributed rising crime to migration from Haiti and Venezuela, called for stricter abortion laws, and spoken out against the LGBTQ community.
Furthermore, he aimed to preserve the economic model of former military dictator Augusto Pinochet, who ruled the country from 1973-1990, and accused Piñera, a fellow conservative, of not abiding by this model. In fact, Kast’s brother, Miguel, was one of Pinochet’s top advisers. It was thus no surprise that Kast was against redrafting the constitution, having said that Pinochet would have voted for him if he were still alive.
Keeping this in mind, Chile’s presidential election was a highly polarising affair that pitted Kast’s desire to maintain the status quo and Pinochet-era policies with Boric’s revolutionary push to introduce a series of socialist reforms and challenge the country’s elites.
Although Chile has Latin America’s second-highest GDP per capita and its second-lowest poverty rate, just 10% of the country’s population controls 40% of the wealth, making it one of the most ‘unequal’ developed nations. Protestors have denounced the fact that the rich are afforded tax breaks while the poor are not provided with adequate social safety nets or adequate medical care.
Kast’s campaign was also somewhat derailed by recent revelations that his German father was a member of the Nazi party. German officials confirmed earlier this month that its Federal Archive has a record of an 18-year-old Michael Kast joining Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party on September 1, 1942. Kast had previously denied allegations of his father’s Nazi past and said that his father was forced to join the party during wartime. However, German historians have said that there are ‘no examples’ of anyone who was “forced to enter the party.”
On the contrary, some Israeli media organizations took a somewhat dim view of Boric’s victory, describing him as an “anti-Zionist” force who has been rejected by Chile’s Jewish community. The Jerusalem Post, for instance, recalled a 2019 incident in which Chile’s Jewish community sent Boric a jar of honey for Rosh Hashana, only for Boric to reply on Twitter: “I appreciate the gesture, but they could have asked Israel to return illegally occupied Palestinian territory.” Boric has also previously drafted bills in the National Congress that called for a boycott of goods, services, and products from Israeli settlements, and called Israel a “murderous state” during a meeting with the Jewish community.
That being said, while Boric’s victory is being held as a historic moment, perhaps a less considered point is the fact that neither candidate was particularly popular in the first round of voting. In fact, Boric actually won 25% of the votes to Kast’s 28% in the first round, suggesting that, regardless of Boric’s victory, Chilean society is likely to remain fractured for some time yet.