He Was the Young, Bearded Hope for the Latin American Left. What Now?

Nov. 15, 2025:

The charismatic and bearded millennial leader was a left-wing sensation. He galvanized young voters, promising sweeping systemic overhaul — social justice, affordable housing, free public transportation and minority rights. He was elected with an enormous vote tally and appointed a record number of women to his cabinet.

The leader was not New York City’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, but the young Chilean president, Gabriel Boric.

When he was elected four years ago, at 35, propelled by a wave of social unrest, many hailed him as the symbol of a new brand of progressive politics in Latin America that focused on economic redistribution while championing human rights and making a clear break with the region’s authoritarian left.

As a wave of leftist leaders swept elections across the region, Mr. Boric’s tattooed forearms made the cover of Time magazine — and his Nirvana T-shirt, poetry quotations and candid talk about his mental health signaled a generational renewal, the “new face of the left in Latin America,” according to El País.

Now, near the end of his mandate, much of that fervor has waned. Chile is preparing for the first round of national elections on Sunday, in which a right-wing candidate is the favorite to win an anticipated runoff and as the leftward shift across South America seems to be reversing.

Chilean presidents are allowed to run for second terms, but not consecutively. Another leftist, a Communist Party candidate, Jeannette Jara, is running for president, though polls show she is likely to be defeated in the runoff by the conservative candidate, José Antonio Kast. He has campaigned on a tough-on-crime platform and is a harsh critic of Mr. Boric.

Mr. Boric’s popularity fell drastically soon after taking office, reflecting early mistakes and worries over security and the economy. His approval rating never significantly recovered, and stabilized at around 30 percent.

Mr. Boric’s sweeping vision clashed with the realities of governing and the emergence of new, urgent challenges, forcing him to scale back his ambitions, prioritize conciliation and assume the role of a more pragmatic, if still consequential, leader.

“There are things that we were not able to do,” said Camila Vallejo, 37, the communications minister, and a prominent figure among Mr. Boric’s generation of leaders. “We had to adjust,” she added in an interview at La Moneda, Chile’s presidential palace. “But we did not change our direction.”

When he took office in 2022, Mr. Boric, who declined to be interviewed for this article, inherited a country under stress, reeling from deadly protests and the coronavirus pandemic, and facing a surge in organized crime and migration that forced him to refocus his agenda.

Leading a minority government, Mr. Boric had to negotiate with other parties in Congress, and the rejection at the polls of a new Constitution torpedoed many of his plans.

Still, Mr. Boric emerged as a rare leftist Latin American leader holding firm to his defense of human rights and condemnations of socialist dictatorships, like Nicaragua’s.

And even though he failed to transform Chile into the “grave of neoliberalism,” as Mr. Boric had promised in 2021, his government adopted some significant welfare measures. He raised the minimum wage, made pensions more generous and public health care free for the poorest Chileans, and shortened the workweek to 40 from 45 hours.

“The government went as far as it could within the rules of the game,” said Miguel Crispi, a close friend of Mr. Boric and until recently, his chief of staff. “There is always going to be a large gap between utopia and governing.”

Patricio Fernández, a journalist and another friend of Mr. Boric, said his government did not end up transformative and “much less revolutionary. It will be a normalizing government.’’

Speaking from the living room of his house in Santiago, where he said Mr. Boric used to sleep on a leather sofa when conversations carried late into the night, Mr. Fernández said the government was “very different from what they expected.”

“They ran into reality,” he said.

It all happened very fast.

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