As polls predicted, Chileans who went to the polls this Sunday (5th) voted overwhelmingly to say “no” to the proposed new constitution, produced with a strong leftist bias. According to the Chilean press, with 99.9% of the votes counted, the rejection prevailed with an overwhelming advantage of more than twenty points: 61.87% over the 38.13% of the approval.
On Sunday night, President Gabriel Boric made a statement to the country already with the information of the rejection. “Today the people of Chile spoke and did it loud and clear, giving us two messages: the first is that they love and value their democracy and trust it to overcome differences and move forward”, declared the president.
Boric minimized the defeat by saying that “on this 4th of September, Chilean democracy comes out more robust, this is how the whole world saw it and recognized it. A country that in its most difficult moments opts for dialogue and agreements to overcome its fractures and pain, and we should be proud of that”.
inequalities
The current Constitution is seen by society as the origin of the country’s inequalities.
However, a report published by Gazeta do Povo pointed out that the proposed text, typically Latin American, could bring poverty and corruption.
To accommodate dozens of ideas on the left of the political spectrum, Chilean constituents wrote an extensive text, with 388 articles. This is more than double the number of articles in the country’s current Constitution.
The new text, written for a year by an assembly with a progressive tendency and with parity between men and women, intended to declare Chile a “social state of law”.
Its supporters, who focus on the left and part of the center, say it will help make the country “fairer” because it enshrines a group of new social rights, the main demand put forward in the country’s 2019 wave of protests.
Opponents, in turn, are on the right and elsewhere in the center and argue that this is a radical text and that it does not unite the country.
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