Although all the polls predicted the rejection of the Constitution submitted to a referendum in Chile on Sunday, none predicted the 24-point difference between the majority, contrary to the text drafted by an ad hoc assembly, and the minority in favor of approving it.supported by President Gabriel Boric and a substantial part of the left. The result confirms the divisive condition of the text, clearly progressive, but also very far from what can always be expected from a Constitution: that the consensus between the different social sectors and the different ideological currents of society be the result so that all of them feel it as their own. Quite a few of the rights collected by the constituents deserve to be highlighted – the recognition of the political identity of indigenous peoples, the consecration of women’s rights, ecological commitment–, but others of a political and identity nature –the reference to plurinationality– have been far from being accepted by the majority of Chilean society.
The result of the referendum should give rise to a broad reflection before the newly minted constituent process promised by Boric gets under way. In the first place, because the law of laws that in the future replaces the one bequeathed by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in 1980 must be the result of consensus and not the predominance of a certain ideological sector that makes others uncomfortable. A democratic Constitution must always be a text with a will to permanence, useful reference whoever governs, something that completely differentiates it from the political programs of parties or coalitions, whose application only requires a parliamentary majority to legitimize its application during a given legislature.
Secondly, because it is unavoidable to be attentive to the social structure. The Chilean constituents did not do it and the multiplication of voices contrary to the drafted text highlighted the difference between the citizens mobilized in the 2019 protests and the right and the urban, centrist middle class, both encouraged in their misgivings too often by the twisted reading of fundamental parts of the new Constitution. At the same time, the ‘fake news’ on social networks, spread by the conservative world, they were as influential in many moments of the political debate as the errors of appreciation made by the authors of the text. In this sense, the vast majority of the rejection vote in the Santiago conurbation and in Valparaíso, the main scenes of the 2019 protests, is significant.
how many in Spain have lavished themselves on underlining the weak points of the Spanish Constitution of 1978 and on Catalonia have believed it possible to challenge the constitutional and statutory framework without a broad and diversified social majority, should draw some conclusions from what happened in Chile. Without social mainstreaming, it is not possible to change the institutional plant, and those who believe they can do so find themselves like Gabriel Boric now: forced to correct the shot, with the consequent political erosion. So it happens that only six months after taking office, the Chilean president must pass the rope, forced to lead a new constitutional process, a necessary operation, which is, at the same time, a great triumph of the right and sharpens the polarization of a fractured society since the middle of Sebastián Piñera’s second term, when the seams of the social pact were torn.