The president-elect of Chile, Gabriel Boric, announced this Friday morning (21) the ministers who will form his government starting on March 11. Among the 24 names announced, a moderate profile prevails, with many chosen linked to the Socialist Party, which was part of the traditional center-left coalition Concertação, and to Apruebo Dignidad, an alliance for which the former student leader contested the election.
The average age of the new ministry is 49 years and reflects the generational shift that the victory of Boric, 35, the youngest to be elected to the post, signifies. The cabinet will also have a female majority, with 14 women and 10 men, and greater representation from the different regions of the country: nine of those selected by the president-elect are from areas outside the metropolitan area of the capital Santiago.
The finance minister will be Mario Marcel, from the Socialist Party, who until this Thursday (20th) was responsible for the Central Bank. The engineer, a graduate of the University of Chile and a graduate of Cambridge University, in the United Kingdom, was unable to attend the ceremony in the garden of the National Museum of Natural History, in Santiago, because he is in isolation after coming into contact with a person with Covid. .
Considered a moderate, he, who participated in several governments after the end of the country’s military dictatorship, will have the mission of calming the markets that flared up the day after Boric’s victory.
For economist Rafael Pizarro, one of Marcel’s strengths is “being an economist in the public sphere, who knows how administration works”. “He is not an economist who will take the mentality of the corporate world, of the market, into the government. Furthermore, he is a person who has already publicly defended a universal basic pension, an aspect that is at the heart of pension reform.”
One of the stars of the campaign, doctor Izkia Siches, strategist for the final stretch of the dispute, will be the first woman to command the Ministry of the Interior. Other collaborators close to Boric and companions in the 2011 student protests will also play a prominent role. Giorgio Jackson will be the secretary general of the presidency, and Camila Vallejo, the spokesperson. She, who belongs to the Communist Party, has been articulating the relationship between Boric and the party, which demands a more radical stance from the elected.
In recent days, for example, sectors linked to the acronym and to the left of Boric have held demonstrations to pressure him, calling for the immediate release of people detained during the 2019 demonstrations and in protests by representatives of the Mapuche people that ended in violence.
Asked about a possible annoyance of the Communist Party for having been left with only three ministries, the president of the acronym, Guillermo Teillier, put on a warm cloth and said that the purpose of the legend “continues to be to fulfill the government program elaborated in the campaign and to accompany and support all measures that lead to this objective”. Vallejo went in the same direction, saying that the cabinet is “the sum of the various wills that exist to strengthen the transformations in Chile”.
“It is not a problem to have representatives of all groups that support us, on the contrary. We are proud to have a majority of women in the cabinet”, said she, who took her daughter to the ceremony.
In his speech, Boric said he was proud to have a cabinet made up of many women, but he made the reservation that former president Michelle Bachelet had already promoted a parity composition. The elected minister also stated that the ministers will have three main tasks: the first is to continue with the fight against the “difficult situation caused by the pandemic” and with “the successful vaccination strategy, also taking care of employment and mental health”. “We have to rebuild the economy without repeating today’s inequalities.”
The second, he added, is to work for the approval of major reforms, “the social security and administrative ones, so that we can improve the lives of the people of the south and put an end to the historic violence against the Mapuche nation.” Finally, he stated that the third commitment is “to take care of the constituent process and ensure that the assembly carries out its work with all conditions and that the plebiscite is victorious”.
Another highlight among the chosen ministers is former deputy Maya Fernández Allende, granddaughter of socialist president Salvador Allende, who was overthrown in the 1973 coup d’état. Other socialists with positions in the ministry are economist and former senator Carlos Montes, in Housing and Urbanism , and Antonia Urrejola, who worked at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and who will serve as chancellor.
The choice of a profile with a critical view of the dictatorships of Venezuela and Nicaragua for the area of international relations signals that Boric should not be condescending to these regimes. He thus rejects the attacks he received during the campaign, which pointed to the alliance with the communists as a point of contact with the authoritarian governments of Nicolás Maduro and Daniel Ortega. Urrejola, born in the United Kingdom, the daughter of Chileans who went into exile during the military dictatorship, worked with Bachelet, now the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, on reports that denounced abuses in those countries.
Another name linked to Bachelet, that of Jeanette Vega, undersecretary of Health during the administration of the former president, will also be part of Boric’s government, in the position of Minister of Social Development. The deputy Marcela Hernando will command the Mining portfolio, the liberal Juan Carlos García will be in charge of Public Works, and Sport will be in the hands of Alexandra Benado, a former player of the soccer team.
For analyst José Francisco Lagos, Boric met the challenge of forming a government with members of Apruebo Dignidad and the Socialist Party, which had been left out of the initial alliance. “He set up a young cabinet, but anchored in tradition, at the Concertação school. Marcel, as finance minister, will give peace of mind on issues such as the autonomy of the Central Bank, something he has always defended.”
The first meeting of the new cabinet will take place even before the inauguration, on the 28th.
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