Was it sexism?

It wasn’t widely re­ported in the Eng­lish lan­guage media but Gabriel Boric, the new left­ist Pres­i­dent of Chile has a Cata­lan mother, María Soledad Font Aguil­era, who was orig­i­nally from the work­ing class area of Badalona near Barcelona. In­stead, his fa­ther’s Croa­t­ian her­itage was em­pha­sised and I sus­pect this is not only be­cause of the sin­gle fam­ily name.

A grad­u­ate of The British School in Punta Are­nas, 35 year old Boric is the youngest holder of his na­tion’s most prized of­fice, hav­ing gained just under 56% of the vote in Chile’s sec­ond round of elec­tions last De­cem­ber. He de­feated the right-wing José An­to­nio Kast, son of a vet­eran of World War II and mil­i­tant in the Ger­man Nazi Party.

Boric’s party was able to earn a vic­tory even after “a sud­den black­out of bus ser­vices in San­ti­ago and across the coun­try forced vot­ers to en­dure long com­mutes in the sum­mer heat to ex­press their basic right to a free and fair vote.

But against these ef­forts at voter sup­pres­sion, the peo­ple of Chile of­fered their cars, vans, and mo­tor­cy­cles to as­sist their neigh­bours to get to the polls.” Most ap­par­ent was his sup­port from younger vot­ers and mil­len­ni­als, tired of the usual di­vi­sive po­lit­i­cal rhetoric.

Irina Kara­manos Adrian, the new Pres­i­dent’s “first lady,” has said she doesn’t want to be the coun­try’s first lady, at least in a tra­di­tional sense. As a writer, an­thro­pol­o­gist and mil­i­tant fem­i­nist orig­i­nally com­ing from Greek and Ger­man im­mi­grants out of Uruguay, in her own right, she has also ap­peared on TV po­lit­i­cal de­bates be­fore the pres­i­den­tial cam­paign.

(To me, if the new pres­i­dent had been a woman then we would have cer­tainly seen a great deal of scrutiny of her life-part­ner/hus­band/wife/sig­nif­i­cant other, or what­ever term you want to use. I have a dis­tinct mem­ory that just over a decade ago when Aus­tralia had its one and only fe­male prime min­is­ter, Julia Gillard, there was a big hooha from con­ser­v­a­tives about how she wasn’t even mar­ried to a man who had the sup­pos­edly “ef­fem­i­nate” job of a hair­dresser.)

Boric him­self came to wider at­ten­tion after his mes­sage on Twit­ter fol­low­ing the in­de­pen­dence con­sul­ta­tion in Cat­alo­nia on Oc­to­ber 1, 2017. He posted the words: “Im­ages of po­lice vi­o­lence in Cat­alo­nia are shock­ing. A firm em­brace from Chile to the Cata­lan peo­ple. More democ­racy, less re­pres­sion”.

An elec­toral dark-horse and sur­prise vic­tor, Boric is to be sworn into of­fice this March in just one of the Latin Amer­i­can coun­tries that have re­cently opted for left-wing pres­i­den­cies; other ex­am­ples being Ar­gentina, Bo­livia, Hon­duras, Mex­ico and Peru.

He was swept into power on an am­bi­tious plat­form of prac­ti­cal changes like rais­ing the min­i­mum wage, re­duc­ing the cost of ed­u­ca­tion, ex­pand­ing the so­cial safety net, fight­ing cli­mate cri­sis and ex­tend­ing rights to in­dige­nous peo­ple and gay and trans­gen­der in­di­vid­u­als. He has even talked about cre­at­ing a British-style na­tional health ser­vice that is uni­ver­sal across Chile.

The big test for any pro­gres­sive leader in power is what they do, not what they say, but if his man­i­festo is any in­di­ca­tion then Eu­rope too could do with plenty more like him.