Uncertainty takes over the streets of Chile as its most historic election in recent years approaches, the one that could transform a leading neoliberal economy in the region into a state that guarantees rights. According to opinion polls, the rejection of the constitutional text proposed by the Convention on July 4 would come out with an advantage, but the fact that it is the first election with a compulsory vote since 2012 changes the rules of the game.
Chile faces its most important electoral election since the plebiscite for the end of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1998) in a process that could transform it from a neoliberal experiment to a State that guarantees rights with an ecological, multinational constitution and the first parity in the world. world, putting it at the forefront of many rights, such as digital or inclusive.
But a part of the Chileans still do not know why they are going to vote.
As “great uncertainty” analysts describe the environment that exists these days in Chile, with a rejection that has remained at the top of the opinion polls since before the constitutional text was finished, but with the question of how a possible mass of millions of voters who could participate in this process – with compulsory voting for the first time since 2012 – and who have not gone to the polls, will vote in several elections.
The electoral process of September 4 is the continuation of an entry plebiscite that in October 2020, he stated that 80% of voters in Chile wanted a new Constitution that it be drafted by a body expressly chosen for it without the participation of conventional politics, an institutional solution to the greatest crisis of democracy that the country experienced, with the outbreak of 2019 by which citizens demanded changes, better pensions, education and health, among others.
Social crisis and pandemic
This process “occurred in a context of social and political crisis and a pandemic, which fundamentally revived many conflicts that Chile had regarding inequality,” Pamela Figueroa, an academic at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the University of Chile, explains to France 24. Santiago. “That polarized the elites a lot. There is high polarization at the elite, economic, and political levels, and citizens are taking positions and decisions in a context where there is also a post-pandemic economic crisis, high security problems, as in other Latin American countries” that emerge more forcefully in Chile today.
For the academic, coordinator of the Nueva Constitución Observatory of the University of Santiago, “it is very difficult to know which of the options is really going to win. If one were to make a projection of the electoral results of the 2020 plebiscite, of the presidential election, of the parliamentary election of the Constituent Conventions of 2021, one might think that approval should win comfortably. But the latest polls have shown that rejection is an option that has been leading citizen preferences in recent weeks, ”she points out.
The election is open due to the uncertain results, but also because the Chilean political class was not part of a parity Constitutional Convention and for the first time in the history of Chile with indigenous representation.
This meant that once the text proposed by the Convention on July 4 was released, the political parties took positions with respect to it. And among the options are those in favor of “approving the text but with reforms” to its most controversial aspects (plurinationality, distribution and balance of powers, others) or those who are in favor of rejecting the text and rewriting it or reforming the current Constitution.
open stage
“This means that beyond the result of September 4 there will be an open political scenario of reforms, either of the new constitutional text if it wins approval or of the current constitutional text if it wins rejection,” which perpetuates uncertainty.
What no one has any doubt about is that, no matter what happens, there will be a new cycle of political reforms in the country “which is also part of the constituent process,” says Figueroa.
The sociologist Axel Callis agrees on the polarization of the Chilean elite “there is an idea that the rejection will win or is very close to it and that has the entire political class, speaking of the post-plebiscite more than the plebiscite itself, including to the president, which is a rather anomalous situation”, analyzes the director of the Pollster “You Influence”, which measures public opinion, consumption, voters and audiences.
“We don’t know how a series of people who have never voted are going to vote. There is a segment that is the most vulnerable people in this country, “the poorest of the poor” as one could say, who never vote and if they are going to vote “we don’t know how they do it”, she points out.
In addition, the surveys measure even the levels of poverty, let’s call it “locatable in terms of telephone or housing, but there is a group below that that are not reachable by the surveys,” he continues. “We don’t know if they’re going to vote” and if they do, what option they’re going to vote for, says Callis.
for the sociologist the future of the country is linked to how narrow or loose one or the other option is imposed “If there is a narrow result, another process will start” more or less quickly, but if the result is loose, the changes will take time.
“If the rejection gains 60-40%, the right will not act quickly to carry out the changes and calibrations of a new constitutional process because it will feel with a citizen mandate that transfers” time to make the changes.
“If the 60-40 approval wins, there will also be a mandate not to substantially modify everything,” despite previous agreements made in Congress and by the political elite to make reforms to the new Constitutional text.
Plan B
Callis highlights as striking the fact that President Gabriel Boric, whose government is in favor of approval since before taking office, has given up on one of the basic principles of an electoral campaign: never take for granted that you are going to win. By proposing, as the president did, that if the rejection wins, a new process will begin to elect conventions and write a new text, Boric sidestepped this principle “and opened the paths of plan B”, with options such as lowering the quorum to reform, even the current and much disputed Constitution of Augusto Pinochet.
Opening the options if the rejection wins “removes tension from the election” since this option wins by “understanding that there is life after life, which is what everyone is promising,” concludes the pollster.
“In either of the two scenarios, the country is willing to advance in more social rights, in a parity democracy, it seems to me that there is a certain consensus that society has developed during these last 2 or 3 years since the social outbreak since 2019”, Figueroa points out on his side, explaining that the cycle of changes is already unstoppable in the country and there is no turning back.
“If the rejection wins, there will be a new constituent process, it is very difficult for the political system and society to be sustained by the current Constitutional text. It is a text that is not only questioned because it originated in the dictatorship, but it is a text that is questioned because it does not account for current Chilean society. It is a text that was made in another context, with other values, with other institutional principles and that does not respond to what Chilean society is today”, he explains.
What remains to be determined is what this new constituent process would be like, how its members would be elected, what its deadlines would be and whether it would take as its starting point the new Constitutional proposal currently proposed and the draft of the new Constitution developed during the second government of Michelle Bachelet (2014-2018).
“If the process continues, it should not be against what was done by the Convention, but from what was done by it,” says the doctor in Political Philosophy and academic of the Adolfo Ibáñez University, Cristobal Belollio. This points to “an idea of cumulative legitimacy, which is not so different in spirit from what is established in some countries to reform the constitution: the approval of two consecutive terms,” says the academic, a former conventional candidate.
For Belollio the problem was that “beyond the letter of the text, this process had to generate a basic and transversal constitutional loyalty, to truly solve the problem we had with the 80’s constitution”, of legitimacy. “I believe that this objective was not achieved, and the fact that public opinion is so divided in the face of the plebiscite is a symptom of that,” he points out about the importance of the debate in Chile that has taken place over the controversies of the constitutional process, which it has overshadowed the content of the text itself.
It seems that whatever happens on September 4, the path of change will be, but not without bumps in the history of this new Chile yet to be written.
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