Thu, Sep 15, 2022 page9

• Chile says no to revolution

  The referendum defeat of a new draft constitution shows that Chileans do not want to jeopardize the progress of the past 30 years

  • By Jorge Castaneda
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  The popular rejection of Chile’s proposed new constitution was expected. Its magnitude was not.

  This month, nearly 62 percent of the 13 million voters who turned out said no to the draft, which was to replace the Chilean constitution written during former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship.

  The overwhelming repudiation of the new constitution is a blow to Chilean President Gabriel Boric, who supported it.

  Moreover, it clearly showed that the constitutional convention that drafted it went far beyond the aspirations and convictions of the Chilean electorate.

  Boric, a former left-wing legislator who was elected president last year, championed the draft written by an assembly largely comprising his allies and companions. As such, he is partly responsible for its failure. While he has announced a Cabinet reshuffle following the referendum loss, he will now be forced to make more tough decisions: which policies to pursue and advisers to keep, and how to keep the reformist promises he made during his campaign.

  It is hard to pinpoint what turned Chilean voters against the proposed constitution, but there is no doubt that fake news and disinformation played a part. It was not difficult to convince voters who had not read the draft’s 170 pages and 388 articles that their homes would be taken away, that they would lose their private healthcare benefits and pensions, that abortion would be legal through the ninth month of pregnancy, and that Chile was about to turn into the next Venezuela.

  Nevertheless, the proposed constitution’s wide-ranging political and judicial reforms repelled many voters who might otherwise have endorsed many of the social and economic rights it meant to enshrine.

  The draft designated Chile as a “plurinational state” and granted indigenous people rights and protections they have long been denied, but it also sought to abolish the Chilean Senate, and called into question the country’s independent and well-respected judiciary by seeking to establish a separate system of indigenous courts. It also included far-reaching environmental protections that, while popular with environmental advocates, frightened many others.

  The proposed draft would have guaranteed more than 100 new rights — more than any other constitution in the world. It sought to make universal healthcare a right, establish gender parity in the executive and legislative branches, strengthen labor unions and tighten mining regulations.

  Some economists, including the finance ministers of previous center-left administrations, thought all this would cost too much.

  However, the proposal could have appealed to a diverse array of constituencies and easily captured more than half the electorate. Instead, it alienated voters who concluded that it would move Chile too far to the left.

  This was not the way it was supposed to happen. When mass protests against the previous right-wing government erupted in October 2019, demonstrators adopted the slogan: “It isn’t about 30 pesos, it’s about 30 years” — a clear message that young people were angry about a lot more than a 30 Chilean peso (US$0.03) metro fare increase that catalyzed the movement.

  Young Chileans were not impressed by the economic growth and poverty reduction in the three decades since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship. Instead, young people raged against high student debt, expensive private healthcare and pension schemes, extreme inequality and a broader, more intangible sense of exclusion.

  For a while, the country’s progressive left seemed to be on a roll. In October 2020, nearly 80 percent of Chileans voted in favor of drawing up a new constitution. Later, academic Elisa Loncon Antileo — a Mapuche — was elected president of the newly created Chilean Constitutional Convention. In December last year, Boric — a 35-year-old socialist and former student campaigner — defeated far-right Chilean presidential candidate Jose Antonio Kast by a large margin.

  However, Boric’s first months in power were rough, owing to the economic damage Chile suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic. GDP growth slowed, the budget deficit widened, inflation rose, violent crime increased (albeit from a low level), and Boric’s coalition struggled to keep its more radical members in line.

  Despite taking office as the new constitution was already receiving its finishing touches, voters came to associate Boric with the proposed draft, which did not help his plummeting poll numbers.

  Given this, the results of this month’s referendum should not come as a surprise. Chileans are more conservative than the events leading up to the vote would suggest, and are generally wary of attempts to break with what many consider a long period of prosperity.

  In the 30 years since the fall of Pinochet, Chile moved from low to middle-income status. Its economic development has been slower than expected, and there is still much work to be done.

  However, nearly two-thirds of Chileans have signaled that they do not want to jeopardize that promise. They probably still want a new constitution, but they want social democracy, perhaps even Christian social democracy. What they definitely do not want, as they showed this month, is a revolution.

  Jorge Castaneda, a former Mexican minister of foreign affairs, is a professor at New York University.

  Copyright: Project Syndicate
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