Chile has said No to the proposal for a new Constitution drafted by a Constitutional Council dominated by the right. With 99% scrutinized, the option against has surpassed the alternative in favor by 55% against 44% in the constitutional plebiscite this Sunday, with a participation of 83%. It was the most likely result, judging by the polls that were released 15 days ago, before the ban on new polls began. But it was an open race, in part because the mandatory nature of voting adds new voters who inject uncertainty into the results and because, according to the polls, there was an upward trend in the option. in favor. After four years of the constituent process, therefore, Chile returns to the same point of November 2019, when the political world offered society to change the Constitution to overcome the social outbreak through institutional means. And it remains with the letter that has been in force since 1980, during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, subject to some 70 reforms since the transition.
The South American country breaks the world record of defeating two constitutional proposals, although the previous one, which was rejected a year ago, was drafted primarily by a left-wing convention. With this Sunday's plebiscite, Chile closes four years of the constituent process. He has done so, as usual, with an example of civility: voting tables set up on time, millions of people calmly waiting their turn to vote, expeditious voting, political leaders with a State attitude and an Electoral Service that has the respect of everyone and quickly delivered the results. On the ballot, two options: in favor and against of a text that had been drafted by a Constitutional Council dominated by the right, especially the conservative Republican Party, a formation close to Vox. The left this Sunday had to settle for choosing “between something bad and something terrible,” as the socialist Michelle Bachelet, president of Chile on two occasions, stated when voting in the morning. That is why this bloc rejected the proposal and preferred, paradoxically, that the Constitution that dates from the dictatorship be maintained.
This is not a victory for the left-wing government of Gabriel Boric, which was about to reject the proposal. In the option against There was the ruling party, but also sectors of the center-left that are not part of the Government and even ultra groups, which surpass the Republican Party on the right. But this plebiscite has given La Moneda a break, because a contrary result would have been a debacle. The Executive and its parties do not celebrate, but they admit they are relieved.
The focus is, above all, on the right. They have lost, but above all the Republican Party, of the extreme right led by José Antonio Kast, who led the constitutional process, despite the fact that this party was never about to change the current Constitution. After the result – a difference of more than 10 points between both options – the traditional right will demand a change in hegemony and will seek to recover its space. “We recognize defeat with clarity and humility,” Kast said this Sunday night.
For the left, the text radicalized the neoliberal project of 1980 and presented values far removed from secularization and the common sense of current Chilean society. “This proposal puts Chile's progress in equality and non-discrimination against women at risk,” says lawyer Macarena Sáez, executive director of the women's rights division of Human Rights Watch (HRW). For the defenders of the text, however, the proposal was not “a right-wing Constitution,” as one of its architects, constitutionalist Jorge Barrera, chief advisor to the Republicans, told this newspaper. Without major differences with the current Constitution, it integrated a key issue: it proposed that basic goods in health, education and pensions be financed with general income, but it ensured a mixed provision, providing for the existence of a state system and a private one.
It was four years of process. This stage opened with the agreements of November 2019, when the political class offered citizens a route to change the Constitution. Now it does not seem at all clear that the country's problems originated from her. There are those who have wondered, like the sociologist Eugenio Tironi, whether it would not have been preferable to undertake a more modest plan of socioeconomic reforms instead of embarking on reforming the constitutional text. Those were the worst days of the social outbreak that put not only the conservative government of Sebastián Piñera, but also democracy, on the ropes. There were massive demonstrations with various demands and unprecedented levels of violence.
No more tries
With this Sunday's plebiscite, Chile's attempts to change the Constitution end. “Whatever the result, the constituent process ends here,” said the spokesperson for Gabriel Boric's Government, Camila Vallejo, a communist militant. Along the same lines was the right-wing mayor Evelyn Matthei, who heads the municipality of Providencia, one of the most affluent in Santiago de Chile. “The only thing I hope is that we finally close this stage,” said Matthei, the main card of the traditional right for the 2025 presidential elections. In those elections there will be a strong competitor from the extreme right, the leader of the Republican Party, José Antonio Kast, who won the first round against Boric in 2021.
In Chile they talk about constitutional fatigue to explain the fatigue of the voters, who have shown rather indifference in this second attempt to change the Constitution. The massive turnout at the polls is explained, above all, by the mandatory nature of voting, which was reinstated last year. The concerns of Chileans are in other emergencies that are not resolved with a new letter.
There is a security crisis that affects the poorest. In five years, Chile's homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants rose from 4.5 to 6.7. If 845 murders were committed in 2018, in 2022 they reached 1,322, according to official data. Chileans' fear of suffering a crime reaches an all-time high, according to the Paz Ciudadana Foundation. The economy has not grown for more than a decade, public school education has not emerged from the crisis that began to manifest itself almost 20 years ago, in the protests of 2006, while the private health system faces serious problems that could drag down the public to a disaster. This is what President Boric said when voting in his native Punta Arenas, in the extreme south of the country: “Regardless of the result of the plebiscite, we are going to work for the people's priorities,” he said. His government still has more than two years ahead of it, until March 2026.
Like every plebiscite, this one also polarized the country. The positions of the former presidents show it. While Bachelet and Lagos were against, the Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle (1994-2000) and the conservative Sebastián Piñera, president of Chile on two occasions (2010-2014 and 2018-2022), voted in favor. “I hope that we take advantage of this opportunity to approve a Constitution in democracy,” said Piñera.
But at no time has the stability of Chile or the solidity of its democracy been at stake, which, however, faces multiple challenges, such as the great citizen disaffection towards politics and towards institutions such as parties, Congress and governments.
Starting this Monday, Chile will begin to draw lessons. Alfredo Sepúlveda, writer and academic at the Diego Portales University (UDP), thinks that this process has been “clearly a failure no matter how you look at it.” “Since 2019, violence and pandemic through, the country has only gone down in all economic and social indices” and, as a result, “neither the current text nor the proposed one will represent a real, broad and consensual social pact, which is “what was sought from the beginning and the only thing that made any sense.” Despite this, the author specialized in the history of Chile recognizes that the country “has sustained itself on an unwritten democratic tradition, which implies the preservation of institutions, habits and customs (the Presidency of the Republic, bicameralism, public freedoms, the peaceful transfer of power) that constitute a kind of tacit common law,” he wrote in EL PAÍS.
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