Chile will decide this December 17 whether or not to approve the draft Constitution prepared by the Constituent Council, a political process with a striking aroma of “déjà vu”: if in September 2022 61 percent of voters rejected the constitutional proposal for being leaning too far to the left, the risk this time is that the text will also be rejected, but for leaning too much to the right.
“Chile faces a key moment to define its future,” said President Gabriel Boric during a solemn ceremony this Tuesday in which the plebiscite was called to determine whether the fifth largest economy in Latin America will be given a new constitutional text that replaces the sanctioned one. in 1980 during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).
“In the event that the proposal is approved, there is no doubt that as a government we will comply with its correct implementation and installation and we will take charge accordingly, together with the other State bodies, of the process of legal reforms that will be required,” added the young president, the furthest to the left since Salvador Allende in the early ’70s.
Boric’s is a great political paradox: the leader of the Broad Front, a diverse leftist coalition that won the 2021 elections, was propelled to the La Moneda Palace by the reformist desires of Chileans after the social explosion of October 2019. Once there, Boric found that the constitutional process made the progress of his government difficult, a situation that worsened when the proposal for the first Constituent Convention was rejected in 2022.
Willing to do things better, chastened by a Convention and a text that had gone too far, the Chilean political powers proposed a different scheme: a group of notables to give an initial framework to the draft Constitution, so that the text was reasonable. But the clear victory of the right and the extreme right in the elections for the Council destroyed the idea of a consensus and a happy medium.
José Antonio Kast, the leader of the hard right defeated in the presidential elections by Boric, became the big winner of those elections, and his political vision prevailed in a body with an absolute majority on the right.
The left-wing councilors criticized the president of the Constituent Council, Beatriz Hevia, for talking about “consensus.” “The text has the approval of only 33 right-wing and far-right councilors, and Mrs. Beatriz Hevia talks about how they built “consensus.” Of course, between her and those who think the same as her. And now, to impose it on all Chileans “Everything wrong,” said socialist deputy Leonardo Soto.
One of the last known surveys, from the Black firm
Unlike what happened in the 2022 plebiscite, Boric’s government did not express itself as such about the project, although the Frente Amplio did announce that it would vote against, as did the Christian Democracy and the Socialist Party, among other political groups. .
“A large majority of 71 percent considers that the decision of the president and the government not to declare a position for or against the plebiscite to exit the new constitutional text is correct.”
If the text is rejected, Chile will continue to be governed by the Pinochet Constitution of 1980, which was amended several times in recent years.