With his Presidency, Gabriel Boric says Chile has “the opportunity to reimagine the left.” But the crucial dichotomy in the region is less between left and right than between democracy and populist authoritarianism.
Since then, the two had built a close friendship, with Boric coming often to Fernández’s home for dinner or to play chess with his teen-age son, León. When their conversations ran late, Boric slept on the couch. These days, Fernández likes to tell visitors, “The President has slept where you are sitting.”, the two men were drawn into the national debate over how to end the upheaval.
Many of the impractical proposals were rejected. But the media, particularly on the right, have presented a steady drip of news about the more bizarre ideas. If the constitutional congress fails, it would be disastrous for Boric’s government, potentially reviving his opponents on both the right and the hard left.
For Boric, this kind of intrigue was just a small indicator of the geopolitical problems that he might face. During one of our conversations, he confessed that he wished he’d seen more of the world before becoming President. He had taken his first trip outside the region when he was thirteen, going with his family to Disney World. He threw up his hands and laughed with embarrassment. At seventeen, he’d lived for four months in a village near Nancy, France, but he’d seen little of the country.
Salvo’s apartment was in a sixties-era building that looked out toward the Andean foothills. He said that it reminded him of East Berlin, where he lived as a child. His father was a socialist who had been jailed and tortured by Pinochet’s regime. In exile, he met Salvo’s mother, a German Communist, and they settled in an apartment near Alexanderplatz.
Many of Boric’s people, in the U.S. context, would be Bernie Sanders supporters. As his longtime political comrade Giorgio Jackson put it to me, “We’re more Allendista than Fidelista. It’s like we’ve been germinated with that democracy seed.” Boric himself is closer to the center. When I asked if he had a role model, he said, a little hesitantly, that he had always admired Allende, but that he didn’t have “static role models.
When I mentioned the Women’s Day march to Ricardo Lagos, the President from 2000 to 2006, he seemed delighted. “This used to be a country of gray suits,” he said. “But in the past thirty years there has been a huge cultural opening!” A grandfatherly man of eighty-four, he received me in his book-filled office at his foundation, Democracy and Development.
La Moneda, the Presidential palace, was restored after Pinochet’s bombing, but Chile’s modern Presidents have lived in their own homes. A few days before Boric’s inauguration, he and Karamanos moved into a new house: a rambling former clinic in an old section of downtown. Boric said excitedly that it had thirteen rooms, a big step up from the small apartment they’d shared before; he would finally have space for his books.
In his inaugural speech, Boric summoned the memory of the coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power, in which the Air Force attacked the Presidential palace. “Never again,” he said. On March 11th, Boric was inaugurated, in Valparaíso, an hour’s drive from Santiago. The ceremony took place in Chile’s congressional building—a concrete behemoth that Pinochet erected near the location of his childhood home. As Boric took his position onstage, he stepped behind Piñera, his predecessor, and executed a curious maneuver involving a complete pirouette; his O.C.D. was flaring up. But the ceremony went smoothly, and at the end Congress rose to applaud.
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