In January 2017, Gabriel Boric surprised everyone in Congress when he entered the floor with a Mohican haircut. It was not the first time that the parliamentarian broke the mold in this regard. In 2014 he had already been sworn in as a deputy without wearing a tie and wearing a raincoat jacket. "I care very little how they judge me for my appearance," said the former student leader at the time. Seven years after that episode, and wearing a much more formal look, Boric will become the youngest president in the entire history of Chile.

Boric will take office on March 11, 2022, days after celebrating his 36th birthday, making him one of the youngest heads of government in the world.

“Don't be afraid of the youth to change this country,” said the law graduate, after surprisingly defeating the Communist Party in the opposition primaries in July of this year. Those elections, according to analysts, began to mark a turning point in a candidacy that arose almost accidentally, but due to the context ended up uniting all the leftist forces despite the multiple differences that exist in the bloc.

Precisely, the turn that Boric's candidacy took in the middle of the year occurred when his presidential option was gaining strength and after clearly defeating Daniel Jadue, of the Communist Party. The changes, in addition to the programmatic and the union discourse with which Boric began to work, also included a strategy so that the parliamentarian -in the eyes of the citizenry- could project an image of governability despite his youth and leave behind that look more casual.

Along with this, Boric moderated the tenor of his proposals to conquer the undecided voters of the center and added nuances to his original ideas, whose base is the strengthening of the State to guarantee the basic rights of citizens.

“Boric's program is social democratic, but the problem is its level of gradualness,” said José Antonio Viera-Gallo, a former ambassador to Argentina between 2015 and 2018 and a historical figure of the conglomerate that led Chile after the Pinochet dictatorship.

For Pamela Figueroa, a political analyst and academic from the University of Santiago (USA), the path taken by the letter from the left consolidated her expectant position in the face of the election.

“By approaching the former Concertación and the Nueva Mayoría, Boric tries to show that in order to govern a broad political alliance is required and that needs to be done with the center-left, with the progressive sectors that have already had experience of government in Chile, although On the other hand, I imagine that not necessarily all the members of the Dignity Approve bloc have the same evaluation,” said Figueroa.

“In this sense Boric has had an important leadership in showing that the path of change, of transformations that Chile could have, is through a gradual model and with broad political alliances, which is very similar to what Michelle did Bachelet in her second term”, added Figueroa.

In the same way, Boric's turn has also generated certain fears in the command about the risk that the hardest left will pass the bill to Boric. However, the representatives of the new generation of the Communist Party, such as the deputies Camila Vallejo and Karol Cariola, have been active collaborators in the campaign, while the old guard of the PC has remained more in the background.