Chileans issued on Sunday a resounding rejection of a new leftist constitution which aimed to transform the country into a more egalitarian society. In a referendum, voters were asked to approve or reject a proposal to replace the magna carta drawn up in times of Augusto Pinochetconsidered one of the least inclusive in the world.
The new constitution provided for a shift towards a more socialist stance, expanding the role of the government and demanding an economic model that would reduce inequalities. But for many Chileans, the proposed changes were too drastic. With 99.9 percent of the ballot boxes counted on Sunday night, about 62 percent of voters disapproved of the new charter.
The results of the vote ended an ambitious democratic experiment that began as an attempt to unify a country in crisis: in 2019, the streets of Chile erupted in protests, driven by middle and working class people fighting against high prices and low wages. In a society long seen as a symbol of prosperity in the region, thousands of Chileans expressed their anger against a government they felt had forgotten them.
Sebastián Piñera negotiated a solution to ease the unrest and pledged to support the drafting of a new constitution. In 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, Chileans voted overwhelmingly in favor of drafting a new charter. But Instead of uniting the nation, the process ended up dividing it once again.
“Due to the pandemic, 1,300,000 people over the age of 50 stopped voting, who are usually more reluctant to change, and with more conservative characteristics. The Chileans who went to vote were from younger generations, and to this is added the factor that they voted independent in the same condition as the traditional political parties, but many turned out to be not very independent and to be anchored to their ideology much more than the citizenship perceived, therefore there was now a citizen disaffection“, explained the Chilean journalist José María del Pino regarding the result of last Sunday’s vote.
“From a political perspective, in Chile the left has once again made the mistake it has made in Latin America. She was always good at diagnosing the problem, but when it came to proposing solutions identitarianism ends up eating them, and they go as in the all or nothing. There are no middle ground or pragmatism. They believed that their solutions were going to have the same popularity as the diagnosis and the truth is that there were as many solutions as there were Chileans”, he added.
“The intelligence of the right was to let goand say that they learned their lesson, and that this constitution is no more. The people are not rejecting to keep the constitution of Augusto Pinochet, but to start a new process. Now President Gabriel Boric must initiate a new national agreement for a new constituent process but with different characteristics”, the analyst pointed out.
“The center of gravity shifts. This reactionary left is going to be out. And he has three and a half years left in government. Boric is going to have to build a broader coalition and run to the center left. If you don’t want to understand it, it will remain irrelevant and we will have a president who governs at cruising speed, but power is transferred to Congress, because decisions will be made there,” Del Pino warned.
“Gabriel Boric is preparing to make a cabinet change in his government where more figures from the center left are going to enter, and he is going to try to lead the agreement for a new constitution because otherwise he will be out of the picture, and he does not want to end up as an irrelevant president”, he concluded.
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