Chile’s new president won from the left. Can he govern like that?

“WE ARE HERE today but we don’t forget where we came from,” Gabriel Boric told several thousand supporters in the square behind the Moneda palace on his first evening as president of Chile on March 11th. “We wouldn’t be here without your mobilisation,” he said, referring to the large and sometimes violent demonstrations in 2019 that shook what had widely been seen as one of Latin America’s most successful countries. The upshot was the swift replacement of the political class, the election victory of Mr Boric, who at 36 is the world’s youngest president, and the arrival in power of Chile’s most left-wing government since Salvador Allende, the radical socialist ousted by Augusto Pinochet in a coup in 1973.