Chile faces another step in its process of institutional re-establishment this Sunday with the holding of a new referendum to elect a constituent assembly tasked with drafting the long-awaited Magna Carta, which must replace the text promoted by the Pinochet dictatorship.
It will be the second component in two years after the first attempt failed. A first draft of a fundamental text was rejected in a referendum last September by 62% of Chileans, further sobering the country and triggering the first major crisis of confidence in President Gabriel Boric’s hopeful left-wing government. who arrived in La Moneda in March 2022.
The nation is “one and indivisible,” says one of the 12 bases agreed to veto the growing role of the Mapuche
The rejection was interpreted as punishment for the anarchic constitutional process launched after the social outburst of 2019, which resulted in a common, progressive constitutional convention with broad Aboriginal representation but plagued by outsiders and independent anti-systems.
During a year’s work, several scandals affected some conventional members and undermined the organ’s standing. Finally, the proposed text seemed too radical for the tastes of the majority of Chileans, who had taken to the streets during the social revolt to demand a profound transformation of the neoliberal socio-economic model bequeathed by the dictatorship.
The rejected text declared in its first article that Chile was a “social and democratic constitutional state”, which was not questioned in this second attempt either. However, opinion polls found that one of the main reasons for the rejection was that the first text also stipulated that the state would be “plurinational, intercultural and ecological”. The Chilean people responded to the increased prominence of the native communities – especially the Mapuche, who for years have been causing tension in their territory, Araucanía, through violent groups – and the direct consequence was that in one of the 12 red lines established to write the second draft constitution insists that “the state of Chile is unitary”.
“The constitution recognizes indigenous peoples as part of the Chilean nation, which is one and indivisible,” says the fourth of these red lines, the 12 “constitutional bases” adopted by the parties with parliamentary representation in an agreement last December, which set the roadmap for a process that will elect the 50 members of the Constitutional Council today, a far fewer number than the 155 members of the previous failed Constituent Assembly.
This council is supplemented by two other bodies, the Expert Commission – which is already working on a draft – and the Admissibility Expert Committee – which will monitor compliance with the red lines – which are elected by Parliament and are composed of experts and lawyers. In this way, the parties secure control of the new constitution, which pleases the establishment and the post-Pinochetist right, which, however, no longer discuss the need for a new Magna Carta and the inclusion of social rights in it, as they did before the social outbreak.
Polls show that Chileans have lost interest in the constitutional process
Although the right was relegated to an irrelevant role in the first constitution for not getting the third of the seats that would have allowed it to block articles, the expectation is now quite the opposite as the left could have trouble up to enough for this third.
Today voting is compulsory and the Chileans seem to have forgotten the social demands. The polls show that they have lost interest in the constituent process to begin demanding order and security in the face of the alarming increase in violent crime being amplified by the mainstream media.
Two years ago, the Independents came as a surprise to voters, but now the council will essentially consist of members of the five candidate coalitions – three from the right and two from the left, one of which includes the majority of MPs from the governing parties – and that grouping of political formations.
On that occasion, Boric – with an approval rating of just 26% – and the government decided to stay out of the campaign to avoid being peppered with results that could indicate a shift to the right in Chilean society, making it more difficult for the young president to implement his ambitious progressive agenda to implement a welfare state in Chile.