Gabriel Boric Elected As Youngest-Ever President Of Chile

35-year-old Gabriel Boric confounded the polls to claim victory in a presidential primary he had barely been old enough to compete in.

Boric who’s capping a remarkable rise for the Andean nation’s progressive left defeated far-right rival Jose Antonio Kast in the country’s presidential runoff on Sunday.

Boric, who will take office in March, 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 also belongs to a radical generation of student leaders who are grimly determined to bury dictator Augusto Pinochet’s bitter legacy once and for all.

“If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave,” Boric said when he won the candidacy of his leftist bloc. “Do not be afraid of the youth changing this country.”

“Chile was the birthplace of neoliberalism, and it shall also be its grave!” he shouted from a stage the night of his primary win, his forearm tattoo peaking out from beneath a rolled-up sleeve.

General Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship bestowed Chile with its extreme economic model, and Boric and his influential cohort of student leaders have taken it upon themselves to dispose of it.

“I know that history doesn’t begin with us,” he declared on stage on Sunday night as president-elect before a baying crowd.

“I feel like an inheritor of the long trajectory of those who, from different places, have tirelessly sought social justice.”

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