By Sulaimon Jamiu
Like a dog with two tails, the whole of Chile was thrown into a state of elation as history was made on Friday, March 11, 2022, when Gabriel Boric was inaugurated as the 36th and youngest-ever President in the country’s history.
Having won 56% of the vote at the presidential polls in December, the 36-year-old former student leader was sworn in along with his cabinet during a ceremony at the Congress building in the port city of Valparaiso.
But, who is Gabriel Boric?
He was born in Punta Arenas, a city near the tip of Chile’s southernmost Patagonia region, in 1986. He has two brothers, Simón and Tomás. Boric studied at The British School in his hometown. He then moved to Santiago to study at University of Chile’s law school in 2004. He finished his courses in 2009, the same year he became President of the Law School students’ union. He then prepared for his degree’s final exam and completed his mandatory internship.
However, he failed the test in 2011 and did not take it a second time. Boric never received a law degree and has mentioned in interviews he never expected to work as a lawyer, saying he preferred to be a writer instead.
During part of his time at university, Boric earned a slot as assistant to professor José Zalaquett in the latter’s human rights course. In an interview, Zalaquett has valued Boric for “his capacity to doubt”.
As a student representative, he became one of the leading figures of the 2011–2013 Chilean student protests.
Boric was twice elected to the Chamber of Deputies representing the Magallanes and Antarctic district, first as an independent candidate in 2013 and then in 2017 as part of the Broad Front, a left-wing coalition he created with several other parties. He is a founding member of Social Convergence, which was formed in 2018 and is one of the constituent parties of Broad Front.
He ran in the 2013 parliamentary elections as an independent candidate to represent District 60 (currently District 28), which encompasses the Region of Magallanes and the Chilean Antarctic. He was elected with 15,418 votes (26.2%), the highest number received by any candidate in the region. The media highlighted the fact that Boric was elected outside of an electoral coalition, thereby successfully breaking through the Chilean bi-nominal election system. Boric was sworn in as a member of the Chamber of Deputies on 11 March 2014.
Prior to his assumption of office, Boric announced the ministers of his cabinet in January 2022. Fourteen out of twenty-four ministers are women, making it the first cabinet in the Americas where more than half of its members are women. The ministers include Alexandra Benado and Marco Antonio Ávila, the first openly LGBT ministers in Chile’s history, and Maya Fernández Allende, the granddaughter of former president Salvador Allende.
