‘You feel it. Allende is here.’

The sense of history was palpable as thousands gathered outside the Moneda Presidential Palace, waving flags emblazoned with the name ‘Boric’ and jumping over barriers to get closer to Chile’s newly inaugurated president. The window from which Gabriel Boric gave his inaugural speech was just next to a window which, fifty years earlier, had plumes of smoke streaming out of it, bombed by General Augusto Pinochet’s air force in a coup that deposed the world’s first democratically-elected Marxist president, Salvador Allende.

This scene, overlooked by Allende’s bespectacled statue, is a happier occasion, with confetti streaming from windows and soldiers deployed to defend the Republic, not to bury it. Chants erupt of ‘the people united will never be defeated’, and when Allende’s statue is shown on screen, the crowd spontaneously burst into ‘se siente, se siente, Allende esta presente’: you feel it, you feel it, Allende is here.

It was the need for change in modern Chile that swept the former student leader to power in December’s election, in the wake of a seventy-eight percent landslide in a referendum for a convention to replace the country’s Pinochet-era constitution. Boric’s electoral platform was in large part based on supporting and defending this arduous process of writing a new constitution from the country’s powerful conservative establishment, many of whom still defend the legacy of Chile’s brutal dictator.

The left-wing Gabriel Boric, whose victorious Apruebo Dignidad coalition was formed less than a year before his election, is an outsider to the Santiago elite in more ways than one. Originally from Punta Arenas in the province of Magellanes in Chile’s frigid far-south, 1,300 miles from Santiago, his background as a leader of the ‘penguin movement’ of students demanding free education marked him out as an effective campaigner.

While he studied at a known crucible of future presidents, the prestigious law school at the University of Chile, a towering sandstone building next to the Plaza Italia, a university classmate already had him marked out for greatness: ‘I saw from the first time I met him that he would be president one day,’ said Leonel Bustamante, 33.

The winds of change are definitely in the air, though some Chileans are getting cold feet now that the scale of proposed changes is becoming clear: polls on approving or rejecting the proposed Constitution are narrowing as a dizzying number of proposals are voted on by the 155-member Constitutional Convention. Many of these proposals are about undoing the damage of Pinochet and the neoliberal University of Chicago economists, who made anything approaching social democracy unconstitutional.

‘A UK-style National Health Service would be unconstitutional under the 1980 constitution. In the last thirty years redistributive measures haven’t even been presented to congress: a new constitution will allow these things to be voted on,’ says Dr Claudia Hiess, head of political science at the University of Santiago.

Some of the proposals, however, are genuinely radical; Chile looks likely to become a ‘plurinational’ state where the rights of indigenous peoples are written into the justice system, to limit weekly working hours to forty, and to create a wide-ranging ‘right to water’ that may de facto nationalise the country’s valuable lithium reserves in the brine underneath the Atacama desert.

Before the constitution is even voted on, the young leader has already announced a number of changes that have shaken up politics. The appointment of the world’s first majority female cabinet was welcomed by attendees at Santiago’s Women’s Day March: ‘It’s a big step forward,’ said sociology student Rocio Navarrete, waving a pansexual pride flag.

The incoming government has made good on promises to crack down on nepotism, announcing a salary cap for political advisors and tightening restrictions for relatives, a move that will prove popular for those weary of the influence of political families.

Outgoing President Piñera was infamous for paying family members as advisors or appointing them to high office, including his Pinochet-defending cousin Andres Chadwick, made Interior Minister, and the Kast family, who notoriously escaped as Nazis after the war. Most remarkable of all, in a nod to history, Boric has appointed Maya Fernandez Allende, the granddaughter of Salvador, as Minister of Defence, putting her in charge of the same armed forces who deposed her grandfather and executed thousands and tortured tens of thousands of his supporters.

Gabriel Boric must aware of the discrepancies between the twenty-five percent of left-wing loyalists who voted for him in the first round of the election and the fifty-five percent who voted for him in the second. While the first want wide-ranging changes and an overhaul of the entire neoliberal system, much of the latter group wants more modest reforms.

His university classmate thinks the former student leader is up to the challenge: ‘He has quite an untypical type of leadership. He has remained a conciliator. He doesn’t want to beat his opponent, he wants to listen to them and incorporate their ideas.’ The incoming president indicates this commitment to different perspectives in a quote by philosopher Albert Camus in his Twitter bio: ‘Doubt should follow conviction like a shadow.’

Boric has already tried to please both parts of his coalition: in a move aimed at calming markets spooked by the spectre of South American socialism, he has appointed establishment figures close to the centre-left parties he relies on for support in Congress as his Finance and Foreign Ministers, while moving key allies such as Izkia Siches and Giorgio Jackson from his rabble-rousing student days into positions at the Interior Ministry and as Secretary General of the Presidency.

These student days were formative for the future leader. Bustamante points out that while other law students were trying to get as close to well-paying apprenticeships as possible, Boric was working under a human rights lawyer well-known for defending those tortured by Pinochet’s regime. ‘The main thing that sustains Gabriel is overcoming Pinochet’s legacy,’ he says.

After an orderly and democratic transfer of power, history looks unlikely to repeat itself—but with a leftist entering Santiago’s La Moneda and a granddaughter of Salvador Allende in charge of Chile’s armed forces, it most certainly rhymes. And as the crowd emptied the Plaza of the Constitution into the streets of Santiago after the new president’s address, with music blaring and hawkers selling beers, the final words of Boric, quoting Allende, stayed with them:

‘Once again compatriots, they will open the grand boulevards to everyone.’