Gabriel Borek was sworn in on Friday, March 11, as President of Chile with a promise to transform this country, once a successful neoliberal laboratory, to promote a welfare state with a feminist eco-conscience and able to reduce fed inequalities. your community.

The former student leader, who has not yet graduated in law from the University of Chile and has been a left-wing lawmaker since 2014, will become the youngest president in Chilean history at the age of 36.

But this does not prevent him from getting a large salary thanks to the laws imposed in that country. Due to the pandemic that has greatly affected Chile’s economy, The Supreme Public Administration Council (ADP) decided to cut the salaries of the political class, including those of the president.

At the time, President Sebastian Pinera earned 9,681,545 Chilean pesos per month, but the reduction left him at 8713391 Chilean pesos, which in the Colombian currency is equivalent to just over 41 million pesos.

This exceeds what the Colombian president has by five million pesos Ivan Duque, who earns 36 million Colombian pesos per month.

Borek comes to power with a feminist, environmentalist, millennial, and moderate rhetoric in a country seeking a new social compact.

An avid reader and lover of poetry in the country of Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, he does not hesitate to advocate for global pop star Taylor Swift on social networks, not to mention the future of the planet and social justice with the former president of Uruguay. Jose Pepe Mujica.

If Chile is the cradle of neoliberalism in Latin America, it will also be its mausoleum. He expressed in July last year when he announced that he was a presidential candidate in the Dignidad approval group with the Communist Party. Since then, his speech has been toned down.

“We don’t have a single model” to follow, he told the media ahead of the first presidential round in November. Its welfare references go through Scandinavia, Uruguay or New Zealand. Borek distanced himself from the leaders of the left in Latin America who defended him from the faith and distanced himself from the Bolivarian governments.

“Venezuela is a failed experiment and the main demonstration is the six million Venezuelan diaspora,” he said in January. He also repudiated the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the suppression of opponents in Nicaragua.

Along these lines, Nicaraguan writers Sergio Ramirez and Gioconda Pelli invited Colombian presidential candidate Gustavo Petro. and to the chief grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Estella de Carlotto.

When he takes off his political suit, he’s just another student out with his girlfriend Irina Karamanos and his friends for a few beers or his favorite sandwich. With a fighter logo t-shirt, shorts, and ankle boots, this fan of metal band instrumentation gives off a cool vibe.

So remembers the bearded and shaggy young man who led the University of Chile (FECH) Student Union and who in 2014, when he was 27 years old, took a first term as deputy.

With information from Agence France-Presse