Governance and Compromise

El Presidente Gabriel Boric y la ministra vocera de gobierno, Camila Vallejo.

Nov. 15, 2025:

Mr. Boric rose to prominence as a firebrand student leader during a 2011 grass-roots movement seeking to make education free. While in college, he was elected to Chile’s Congress, where not wearing a tie during his first appearance caused an uproar.

In 2019, protests spread throughout Chile, demanding improvements to living standards and radical change to a market-based economic model in a rich, but deeply unequal country. A top goal was to replace Chile’s Constitution, adopted under the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

The unrest created ideal conditions for the candidacy of Mr. Boric, an empathetic, eloquent orator rooted in the country’s social movements.

“The people of Chile are central to this process. We would not be here without their mobilizations,” Mr. Boric said in his inaugural address from La Moneda, as his ministers, many in their early 30s, were introduced to the crowd like rock stars.

The start of Mr. Boric’s government featured a series of symbolic acts, including appointing the first female interior minister, Izkia Siches, 35, and naming as defense minister Maya Fernández Allende, a granddaughter of Chile’s former Marxist president, Salvador Allende.

But it also featured several missteps that the opposition blamed on inexperience.

Three days into Mr. Boric’s tenure, Ms. Siches traveled to an area in southern Chile where the Indigenous Mapuche were disputing land rights; she was hoping to open dialogue with local leaders. But she had to be hustled away after gunfire erupted.

Mr. Boric regretted the episode, saying his government needed to do more homework before professing to have solutions.

Voters also resoundingly rejected a referendum to adopt the new Constitution, which Mr. Boric had supported and whose text had been drafted by an elected and largely left-wing constitutional convention.

The proposed language would have enshrined a host of social rights and systemic overhauls, including gender parity in public institutions, the abolition of Chile’s private pension model and recognizing the sentience of animals.

“The country threw cold water on them — bucket and all,” said Lucía Dammert, a sociologist and Mr. Boric’s first chief of staff.

“There was an illusion that the constitutional change could establish the foundations for a much deeper change in society,” she added. “It failed.”

The constitutional referendum’s defeat started what Ms. Dammert described as a 90-degree turn in Mr. Boric’s presidency. In a cabinet reshuffle, some of the younger, less experienced ministers were replaced by older, more traditional figures — such as members of the Socialist or Social Democratic camps.

“That’s when the Social Democratic cavalry had to come to the rescue,” said Ricardo Solari, 71, a former minister and Socialist Party power broker. The Boric generation, he said, “had made a break with our political tradition, which they were criticizing, but to which they ultimately had to return.”

Álvaro Elizalde, 56, a socialist and now the interior minister, said in an interview that the government’s coalition building allowed them to expand affordable housing, effectively harness and redistribute revenue from mining companies in the minerals-rich country, and fight crime.

Mr. Boric, who had previously criticized the use of force by the national police, strongly backed the department, increasing the budget and creating a public security ministry.

His actions drew criticism from the right and the left.

Mr. Kast deemed his actions insufficient, saying Mr. Boric “promised hope and gives us insecurity.” He accused the president, in a speech this week, of presiding over a state “captured by inefficiency, by ideology, by fear.”

Some on the left accused him of betrayal, especially after he approved the continuation of the deployment of the military in an effort to deal with the Mapuche conflict in southern Chile, something he had promised to stop.

It was “a military action that not even a right-wing government had sought to have in the area,” said Gabriel Aldea, 37, a computer programmer in Santiago, who voted for Mr. Boric. “It is quite disappointing.”

Mr. Aldea said he resented the government for narrowing its scope.

“The government’s program was completely re-foundational,” Mr. Aldea said. “It sought to end the Western capitalist neoliberal system, it aimed to be a social experiment. They gave up everything.”

But the government has urged Chileans to judge it on its accomplishments instead of focusing on what officials called unrealistic projections.

“With new governments,” Ms. Vallejo said, “there is always a problem with expectations.”

- Authors: Emma Bubola and John Bartlett, The New York Times