Political diabolism. The phrase is borrowed from Chilean Gabriel Salazar, National History Prize, to refer to what he describes as the illegitimacy of the new attempt to write the Magna Carta, which began in Chile on September 4 following the completion of the previous phase. In an exit vote held that day, Chileans rejected by 62% a bill drafted by the first ballot box elected constitutional assembly in its entire history, which also respected gender parity.
The historian posits it as part of a broader call for the vote to be canceled as a protest at the May 7 election that will use compulsory suffrage to elect the new constitutional councillors. This process presented some difficulties due to a mixed design that arose as an alternative, aiming to replace the 1980 Constitution, was the result of an agreement between the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate and was legitimized by the Executive of Gabriel Boric. After disappointing the independents the protagonism conceded to them in the previous phase, on this occasion the parties have again taken control by including the figure of experts as well as an admissibility committee that must ensure the respect of twelve bases or edges of matched to them.
But that is not the only difficulty facing the new constitutional cycle. In fact, a large part of the public conversation about the outcome of the election of those who will integrate it, contributes to distorting the very meaning of the process, thinking about it in the key of the election tactics and limiting its result to the calculation the measurement of forces between the political actors. In Chile, they point to their impact on the internal restructuring of the right- and left-wing conglomerates and their impact on a government that, among the possible options, could transform a negative scenario, especially when forces like those of the Republican Party (PR) and the Popular Party (PDG) do not consider the constitutional amendment to be necessary. To this must be added, as no less a fact, the existence of a general climate of citizen dissatisfaction with the process, on which most polls agree.
But even the previous attempt at a constitution, which was behind a supposedly favorable dynamic, did not have everything in it. This first attempt was bolstered by citizen support expressed in the 2020 accession referendum of 78.28% for replacing the 1980 Constitution, along with a similar percentage for a Constituent Assembly consisting solely of referendum elected members.
It is forgotten that under the epic of the so-called octobrismo – as the spirit of the 2019 protests is called – the consultations to launch a route for drafting a constitution were conducted with a voluntary vote, so half of the electorate did not turn up . When the election of the conventional members to draft the new text then took place in May 2021, only 43% of the voters voted. Furthermore, during the already ongoing constitutional convention, Jonathan Haidt, the renowned American psychologist, stated that the need to act for social networks meant that this first process was doomed from the start. Without hiding his pessimism, he concluded: “At the moment there is no way to understand common interests.”
The absence of that relieving momentum or situation that once thought to be on the horizon transcends the immediacy of the expansive wave of social eruption, as former Socialist President Michelle Bachelet attempted to initiate one during her second term, between 2014 and 2018 Way of changing the constitution through consultations with the citizens. Several councils were held across the country to conduct a deliberation, led by the presidency without giving due consideration to the opposition, and which ended at the end of his term with a proposal presented to Congress. The strange thing is that chroniclers of the Chilean constitutional adventure often forget this attempt.
It is likely that the fact that this political system is experiencing its lowest hour worldwide today does not help an experience seen as essential to salvaging democracy. This is confirmed by the main studies that examine his condition year after year. So much so that the level of democracy enjoyed by world citizens in 2021 has dropped to where it was in 1989. The democratic advances of the last 30 years have been eradicated and almost 70% of the world’s population lives in dictatorships.
Furthermore, the previous failed phase can be seen as an arena in which some keys to democratic erosion observed in different contexts were expressed at the micro level. Although intended to overthrow the idea of supervised democracy exuded by the 1980 constitution, the rejected text was a weak tool. While it enshrined an important and avant-garde set of rights, it lacked real checks and balances between powers, did not pay due attention to the protection of minorities, and included a full review of the judicial system and the application of the law, which winked at this autocratic legalism and in several countries as one of the signs of de-democratization.
Nor can one proceed any further without at least looking from the corner of one’s eye at the disruptive potential of the new stage of artificial intelligence, which historian Yuval Noah Harari believes threatens democracy itself “because it relies on conversation in public”.
Despite the fact that the definitive overthrow of the constitution of Augusto Pinochet’s military regime was seen by the political class as a way out of the crisis provoked by the social outburst of October 2019, with consequences for accelerating the erosion of traditional sources of legitimacy , the truth is that the genie of the constitutional amendment came out of the bottle a long time ago and it is likely that the favorable momentum to carry it out will never be found.
Maria de Los Angeles Fernandez Ramil has a doctorate in political science and is a Spanish-Chilean political scientist.