Thursday, March 28

Chile’s president-elect seeks advisers in Michelle Bachelet’s circle


Correspondent in Santiago de Chile

Updated:

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Almost two weeks after the deputy Gabriel Boric became president-elect, it was evident the difficulties he will have when forming a government within the margins of an alliance, I Approve Dignity, with few cadres with experience in State administration.

Aware of this, Boric has given signs that he will resort to figures from the ex-Concertación, a conglomerate that governed Chile since 1990, with intervals of right-wing governments, to fill the more than two thousand positions of direct appointment of the president, starting with the 24 ministers and respective undersecretaries.

However, there was nothing to suggest that the circle close to the elected ruler, who accompanied him in his first guidelines, would surround itself with dstaked advisers to former President Michelle Bachelet, one of the targets most attacked by the Broad Front when it entered politics in 2017.

In recent days, Boric has left accompanied by the ex-president’s press officer, the journalist Haydee Rojas, and it was revealed that the powerful ideologue of the New Majority government (the former Concertación plus the Communist Party), the sociologist Pedro Güell. This was the one who developed the “realism without resignation” strategy that Bachelet had to apply when the series of simultaneous reforms that he promoted since 2014 began to stall and many demanded to leave some behind.

Boric moved his entire team to a new headquarters located in the Providencia commune, called ‘La Moneda chica’, where he has held multiple meetings aimed at defining who will make up his cabinet.

At the same time, the communities of Approve Dignity resolved that they are not going to expand their formal borders, refusing to include new movements, but they will open up to what they called “personal collaborations.”

Boric’s coordinator and political strategist, MP Giorgio Jackson, acknowledged that there is an “initial relationship” to have some socialists and independents in the cabinet.

Maintain independence

This was one of the issues addressed by Boric in a meeting with the PS helmsman, Senator Álvaro Elizalde, but the materialization is complex because it stresses the broken relations within that party. Various leaders of socialism demanded that the directive not view the appointments in order to maintain a certain independence, although Senator Carlos Montes, the deputy are mentioned Maya Fernández (granddaughter of Salvador Allende) and the former party candidate Paula Narváez as nominees insurance.

The other parties of the ex-Concertación would be incorporated into what Jackson described as “administration rings,” that is, in second-level positions such as service directors and regional ministerial secretariats. For that, the strategist met with the Radical Party and held talks with the Liberal group.

There are greater difficulties with the Party for Democracy, which had not been contacted until this Wednesday and involved a complaint that Boric tried to clear up with a phone call. However, in the ranks of the PPD there is greater reluctance because the CP exercised a veto over them in the past and relations were frozen.

The Christian Democracy does not appear until now on Boric’s radar and the former president of that party, Ignacio Walker, has already clarified that if a comrade accepts a position, he must renounce his membership.

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