Pak Sahafat: Gabriel Zaliasnik, a prominent member of the Chilean Jewish community, told Haaretz: “What we hear from Borik is that Israel is a genocidal and murderous state.”
“The thinnest country on earth turned left,” was the clearest description given by Jose Antonio Cast, a former and far-right member of the Chilean Congress, after Monday’s defeat in the presidential election. The defeated candidate, meanwhile, sarcastically admitted defeat in the election to his left-wing rival, calling the victorious party the new Chilean Communist Party. The description comes as the defeated candidate seeks to undermine the position of 35-year-old Gabriel Boric, now Chile’s president. But he did not seem to know that his attacks on the left-wing Borik and even calling him a communist had been an unwelcome propaganda in favor of his rival, and that the same emphasis and repetition on Borik’s left caused him to lose by a significant margin to the right-wing candidate close to Washington.
Boric comes from the southernmost regions of Chile. Ten years ago, he led a student protest in Santiago and, in a recent election, emerged as the protagonist of protests against capitalist inequality. He has said he will change Chile’s private pension system, which was one of the main demands of protesters in 2019, and has promised to promote “green development” and make his government more dependent on taxes than the rich.
Chile’s right-wing and conservative politicians have failed in what is today one of the most unequal countries in the world. According to the UN ECLAC, one percent of Chile’s wealthy people own more than a quarter of the country’s wealth. Economic inequality in Chile is at a time when various parties with left and right tendencies have been in power for the past three decades since the coup d’état of General Pinochet. Gabriel Boric is not the first left-wing president in Chile since the Pinochet era, but he is the first Chilean president to take power since the repeal of the Pinochet constitution.
The burning of the Israeli flag in Turkey on the eve of Herzog’s visit to Ankara
The Pinochet-era constitution was in place in Chile until late 2019, but amid widespread protests, the Conservative government held a referendum, with more than 78 percent of Chileans after years of waiting for the November 4 referendum to tackle economic inequality at the ballot box. The current constitution of Chile was written 40 years ago during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, and protesters believe that the constitution is one of the main causes of inequality in Chile, and now the new president will be responsible for creating a mechanism for the constitution. Chile’s new constitution is expected to bring about fundamental changes in Chile’s foreign policy and economic plans.
Although many have said that Chile’s new president’s leftist approach is different from that of other Latin American countries such as Venezuela, Nicaragua or Bolivia, there is no doubt that the outcome of the Chilean election will strengthen the anti-Zionist front in Latin America.
The new Chilean president has repeatedly criticized Israel, even calling on Chilean Jews not to sponsor or support Tel Aviv in one of his election speeches. Boric’s criticisms and attacks on Israel have a long history, and during his time in the Chilean Congress he supported a plan to ban Israeli goods from the Golan Heights and Zionist settlements in the occupied West Bank. “Gabriel Zaliasnik, a prominent member of the Chilean Jewish community, told Haaretz: “What we hear from Borik is that Israel is a genocidal and murderous state.” Gabriel also repeatedly called Israel an “assassin state” during his campaign to show his strongly anti-Israel stance, and interestingly, he won 10 percent more votes than his conservative rival. Under these circumstances, Borik’s victory seems to be able to strengthen the political front of the Tel Aviv opposition states in Latin America, especially since Borik announced that he would choose his deputy from a Palestinian citizen.