Gabriel Boric

Gabriel Boric Font (born 11 February 1986) is a Chilean politician who served as President of Chile from 2022 to 2026. Before that, he held two consecutive terms in the Chamber of Deputies, from 2014 to 2022. Boric first gained national attention as a student leader during the 2011–2013 protests, heading the University of Chile Student Federation. He later helped found the Social Convergence party. In December 2021, he won the presidential election with 55.9% of the vote in the second round, defeating José Antonio Kast. When he took office on 11 March 2022, he became Chile’s youngest president. His cabinet was the first in the Americas with a female majority. A proposed new constitution backed by his government was rejected by voters in September 2022. Boric was born in Punta Arenas to a family of Croatian and Catalan descent. On his father’s side, his ancestors came from the island of Ugljan, Croatia, migrating from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Chile in 1897. His great-grandfather, Juan Boric, and his brother Simón arrived in Punta Arenas around 1885, among the first ten Croats to settle in Magallanes. They took part in the Tierra del Fuego gold rush, then Juan briefly returned to Ugljan to marry Natalia Crnosija, bringing her back to Magallanes, where ten of their eleven children were born. Boric’s grandfather, Luis Boric Crnosija, was born in 1908. His father, Luis Boric Scarpa, a chemical engineer, worked for Empresa Nacional del Petróleo for over 40 years. His mother, María Soledad Font Aguilera, is of Catalan descent. Boric has two brothers, Simón and Tomás. His granduncle, Vladimiro Boric, became the first bishop of Punta Arenas. Another granduncle, Roque Scarpa Martinich, was the first intendant of the Magallanes Region after the military dictatorship. Both Roque Scarpa and Boric’s father were members of the Christian Democratic Party. Yet another granduncle, Roque Esteban Scarpa, won the 1980 Chilean National Prize for Literature, and granduncle Vicente Boric was also a writer. Boric attended The British School in Punta Arenas before moving to Santiago in 2004 to study law at the University of Chile. He completed his coursework in 2009, the same year he became president of the Law School students’ union. He then focused on his final exam and mandatory internship but did not pass the test in 2011 and chose not to retake it. He never earned a law degree, stating in interviews that he never planned to be a lawyer and instead wanted to be a writer. During university, he worked as an assistant to Professor José Zalaquett in a human rights course; Zalaquett later praised Boric’s tendency to question and doubt. In 1999 and 2000, Boric helped re-establish the Federation of Secondary School Students of Punta Arenas. At university, he joined the political collective Autonomous Left, originally called Autonomous Students. In 2008, he advised the Law Department Students’ Union, and in 2009 became its president, leading a 44-day protest against the dean. From 2010 to 2012, he served as a university senator. In December 2011, he ran for president of the University of Chile Student Federation as part of the Creando Izquierda list, winning with 30.52% of the vote and defeating incumbent Camila Vallejo. As FECh president, he was a key figure in the second phase of the 2011 student protests and a primary spokesperson for the Federation of Chilean Students. In 2012, El Sábado magazine and Adolfo Ibáñez University named him one of Chile’s 100 young leaders. Boric ran for the Chamber of Deputies in 2013 as an independent for District 60 (now District 28) in the Magallanes and Chilean Antarctic Region. He won 15,418 votes (26.2%), the highest total in the region, and his victory outside an electoral coalition was noted for breaking the binomial system. He took office on 11 March 2014. During his first term, he served on commissions for Human Rights and Indigenous Peoples; Extreme Zones and the Chilean Antarctic; and Labour and Social Security.