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More than 15 million Chileans have an appointment this Sunday to approve or reject the new Magna Carta project. The country reaches a point of inflection and great division, after a social explosion, a plebiscite to change the Constitution, a polarized presidential election and a war of disinformation.
From RFI’s Special Envoy to Santiago, Melissa Barra.
On Sunday, September 4, Chileans must decideif they validate the draft of the Constitution drawn up by the Conventional Assembly and presented last July.
In 2021, they had already voted 78% in favor of a Magna Carta change. This happened two years after the social uprisings that gave the country a political turn and that brought the leftist Gabriel Boric to the presidency broke out.
In this continuity, the new plebiscite resembles a last stop. However, polls in recent weeks suggest that the rejection will expire on Sunday night. Voting is compulsory and the forecasts may still be very uncertain in a country where half of the electorate has not voted since 2012, the date on which suffrage ceased to be compulsory.
This draft Constitution, one of the longest in the world with 388 articles, has divided opinion into two camps, even within the center-left sectors or those who participated in the outbreak.
Several factors have given advantage to the rejection, especially the exhaustion of the economic situation, the increase in insecurity and the internal wars that have been declared among the conventional members.
Plurinationality and Social State
“Any Constitution, whether it is erroneous, is better than the Constitution that Augusto Pinochet left us,” Ricardo, a resident of Santiago who went into exile during the dictatorship, tells RFI. He explains that the changes introduced by the project will serve to improve the lives of the most precarious and gives his case as an example: At 76, the former engineer works as a driver to supplement his small pension of just over $200 a month.
“Chile is a social state of law,” says the proposed text. It seeks to transform the subsidiary state that currently governs into a welfare state, with new recognitions such as the right to health, education and abortion, or the plurinationality of Chile or modifications to the justice system. These are some of the most controversial.
The campaign was alsofull of mines of disinformation, about its content, about the conventional ones and about possible frauds in the plebiscite.
Incognito of the constituent process
The Chilean ruling party has suggested that whatever the result, the constitutional destiny of the country is not sealed. If approved, it has agreed to provide improvements and details to the project that the former conventional handed over to the government on July 4.
If the rejection wins, it is not expected that the Constitution in force since the dictatorship will be maintained as it is, since a large part considers that even so the constituent process must continue. Something that Gabriel Boric reiterated in July. What format would be chosen, with a new plebiscite or a new constituent? That is the great unknown. The truth is that a new chapter will open: that of negotiation.
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