Gabriel Boric beat the far right in Chile. Now he has to unite a divided country | Kirsten Sehnbruch

The former student firebrand will need all his powers of persuasion and pragmatism if he is to deliver

Victory is sweet. The hundreds of thousands of Chileans who took to the streets to celebrate the victory of the leftwing former student leader, Gabriel Boric, in Chile's presidential runoff elections certainly thought so. Boric won with a 12-point margin and a historic number of votes, imposing a convincing defeat on the rightwing candidate Jose Antonio Kast that few would have predicted only a month ago. Yet Boric's victory speech was anything but gloating.

Nodding towards the years of polarisation and protest leading up to the election, he stressed the need for social cohesion, refinding ourselves, and sharing common ground".

Kirsten Sehnbruch is a British Academy global professor at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and co-editor of Democratic Chile: The Politics and Policies of a Historic Coalition