Chile rejected this Sunday by an overwhelming majority a Draft Constitution that sought to change the one inherited from the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet for another with more social rights, in a severe setback for President Gabriel Boric which exceeded the most optimistic expectations of the conservative opposition.
“As President, I humbly accept this message and make it my own. We must listen to the voice of the people,” Boric said in a message to the nation after announcing the unexpectedly forceful result. The president warned, however, that the drafting of a new Magna Carta was the way out of a “malaise (which) is still latent” and that Chile cannot ignore, referring to the social outbreak of 2019.
The “Rejection” was imposed with 61.88% of the votes compared to 38.1% of the “Approve”, after counting more than 99% of the votes, in a day with the historical participation of more than 13 million voters, a total of 15.1 million summoned to vote in a compulsory way.
Why did the Chileans reject the new proposal?
The forcefulness of the results is reminiscent of the plebiscite of October 2020, called to channel the wave of protests of 2019 and where 78.2% of Chileans decided to start a constituent process and draft a new Constitution.
Two years later, Chileans are not satisfied with the text that was drafted for a year by a convention of democratically elected citizens just for that purpose, with gender parity and seats reserved for indigenous people.
“Despite the fact that previous polls gave the ‘Rejection’ as the winner, the difference achieved is greater than expected. There is a saying that is always imposed in Chile: the known devil is better than one to be known,” Jeanne Simón, of the University of Concepcion.
The multinational nature of the State, the right to voluntary interruption of pregnancy, presidential reelection, the justice system and the elimination of the Senate are some of the issues included in the new text that generated more animosity among citizens.
The two official coalitions, Approve Dignity and Democratic Socialism, promised to reform the text and moderate the most controversial aspects if approved, but it has not been enough to convince voters.
“The triumph of ‘Rejection’ is the great defeat of an ideology that tried to impose plurinationality on Chileans and many other concepts so foreign to our idiosyncrasies,” Gonzalo Müller, from the Universidad del Desarrollo, assured Efe.
“Nobody anticipated this distance of more than 20 percentage points,” said sociologist Marta Lagos, founder of the Mori pollster, on Twitter. The holding of the referendum on a new Magna Carta, after the great social revolt of 2019 in demand for greater social justice, had had the support of almost 80% of the voters who voted in a plebiscite in October 2020 that launched the constitutional process .
The resounding victory of the rejection is explained by the fear of a large majority that the constitutional proposal would completely annul the political opposition, in addition to the lack of gradualness in the implementation of the proposed measures, analyst Marcello explained to AFP Mella, from the University of Santiago. All the polls had anticipated the victory of the “Rejection” but none with such ease.
AFP and EFE
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