Daniel Jadue, one of the main figures of the Communist Party of Chile, reflected this Sunday, perhaps like no other exponent of local politics, the mixture of fatigue and impotence in the face of the succession of electoral processes in which the country has been immersed since the outbreak. October 2019 social news: a reporter’s simple and insistent questions caused her to lose her temper.
“I ask for a little more respect, thank you very much,” was the unusual reaction of Jadue, mayor of the Santiago commune of Recoleta, while with his hand he lowered the reporter’s arm and moved the microphone away from her face upon entering a restaurant. vote.
The last question from the CNN Chile reporter had been direct, very clear, but the last thing Jadue wanted was to respond on the subject: “Are you willing to promote a new constituent process?”
The question included an implicit premise, that of the failure of the left, which as of 2019 successfully installed the idea that in the Constitution sanctioned in 1980 by the dictator Augusto Pinochet and reformed in 2005 by the social democrat Ricardo Lagos were all the problems of the country, and that the solutions will be found in a new Magna Carta.
The first plebiscite, in September 2022, rejected by 62% the proposal for an excessively left-wing and almost refoundational text of the State; the second, this December 2023, proposes what many see as a “right-wing Constitution.” It is the Chilean political pendulum, increasingly accelerated and crazy.
But whatever happens in this Sunday’s election, the left will have failed. If the Constitution written by Los Republicanos is approved, the hard right around José Antonio Kast will see the man who lost the presidential election just two years ago with Gabriel Boric as the winner. If he wins the rejection, the mere fact of a left relieved at the survival of “Pinochet’s Constitution” says it all.
“I’ll be honest with you: I haven’t read the proposed Constitution, I’m not aware of anything.” The phrase was repeated over the weekend when this newspaper consulted different Chilean citizens. Exhausted before the fifth constitutional vote since 2020, the 15.4 million Chileans called to vote took the matter philosophically: voting is mandatory, and therefore, they voted on a sunny day in Santiago, cool at first, hot as the The hours went by…
Even so, on the brink of the start of the summer holidays in the southern hemisphere, no one expects the figure of 85.7% participation in that 2022 plebiscite to be reached.
The proposed text has 17 chapters and 216 articles, making it the second longest Constitution in Latin America. With the more than absolute majority of 33 councilors from the hard right and the traditional right in the Constitutional Council, the text issued is, in some aspects, harsher than that of 1980.
The defense of the “right to life of the unborn” is seen by the left as a way to block the law that allows abortion in three cases. The immediate expulsion of irregular migrants or the tax exemption for the first home, for the benefit of people with higher incomes, is also criticized by the government coalition. It is proposed that the State finance education by paying for each enrolled student, instead of allocating a general budget to schools, and the Pension Fund Administrators (AFP) are strengthened, whose influence Boric wants to reduce.
Whatever happens, Chileans ask to stop voting.
“The constituent process is finished no matter what happens today. People are exhausted,” said Tomás Bogdanovic, mayor of the Santiago commune of Maipú, this Sunday. “We have not been able to generate a text that unites the majorities; there are people who were directly called to screw themselves with this constitutional project.”
Former President Michelle Bachelet was somewhat cryptic when she voted: “I prefer something bad to something terrible.” That is, he will vote the opposite of what her successor in office, Sebastián Piñera, will do. “I prefer a Constitution born in democracy!” said the man who governed Chile between 2009 and 2013 and 2017 and 2021.
Jorge Schaulson, former president of the Chamber of Deputies, believes that Chile has a way out of the constitutional labyrinth. “We have been desperately looking for ‘one that unites us’ and it turns out that we already had it right under our noses. It is the current vilified constitution, the only one that attracts support ranging from the extreme left to the most rancid right, passing through the center” .
This entire journey to return to the starting point, Schaulson says: “Many on the left had their ‘epiphany’ and discovered that the current constitution is not so bad or perverse, that in reality Lagos was not so lost when in the signing ceremony of the new constitution said that ‘this is a very great day for Chile, we have reasons to celebrate, we have today, finally, a Democratic Constitution, in accordance with the spirit of Chile, with the permanent Soul of Chile’, receiving a ovation from all the leaders of the left, most of whom remain so to this day.
