A year after Chilean citizens rejected the draft of the new Constitution prepared by the left, The text written by a constituent assembly with a conservative and extreme right majority. The 11-point advantage garnered by the vote against the Constitution submitted to a referendum leaves no room for doubt: Chileans prefer the law of laws approved in 1980, when Augusto Pinochet still governed the country, reformed many times, than the two alternatives. that have been submitted to your consideration. The reasons are multiple and complex, of which two stand out: the projects have been far from the expectations and most pressing needs of voters and the parties have not been sensitive enough to submit for consultation texts in which the electorate feels recognized.
After the social mobilization of 2019, during the second term of Sebastian Piñera, The left interpreted that the country was demanding a constitutional change that would enshrine the social State and recognize the rights of the indigenous peoples. Gabriel Boric, acting president, crashed when faced with reality: the project presented for consultation was far from the need to undertake immediate reforms in the economy, health, education and pensions to end the logic of the privatization of services essential. He understood José Antonio Kast, leader of the extreme right, that, in light of Boric’s failure, it was viable to carry out a neoliberal-oriented project or, in other words, one that abounded in the inheritance received from Pinochet. He was also wrong: to a country with zero growth in 2023, it seems that more of the same, corrected and increased, is the worst way out of the quagmire.
Nobody wins these two queries. except for those who sensed that, beyond the 2019 protest, the silent majority does not want to embark on extreme solutions which is what they ultimately represented the two draft Constitutions rejected. Neither does it reinforce Boric in his popular acceptance of the result of Sunday’s referendum nor does it reinforce Kast in his claim to be the next president of Chile. On the contrary, an immediate future dominated by uncertainty opens up. For the president, because he must attend to the demands for profound effective changes in social programs; for Kast, because he will have to face the open competition of the Independent Democratic Union, headed by María José Hoffman, a party as conservative as the Republican Party of Kast and that disputes primacy with it in the same political space.
There is in Sunday’s result and in that of a year ago a global challenge to the approach that the big parties give to the social crisis. The great paradox is that, in the heat of such challenge, the normative legacy of the dictatorship survives, although it has been subject to successive reforms and adjustments, and feeds the longing for the unity of social democrats and Christian democrats, who for two decades ran together in presidential elections and guaranteed stability. Boric’s announcement is completely logical, which closes the constituent cycle that he himself opened.