2023-12-23 23:23:33
Last Sunday, Chile closed the constituent process that has been going through the four most intense years since the return to democracy. The social outbreak of October 2019 opened a period full of important dates and epic days: from the massive protests that were held uninterruptedly for months, to the historic plebiscites for a new Constitution or the birth of constituent bodies elected for the first time by citizens. .
Chile rejects the new Constitution with an ultra-conservative seal
The lengthy discussion about the model of country that Chile wanted to be entrenched social polarization and, like a roller coaster, raised and catapulted the expectations of both parties. The final result has been two failed and radically opposed attempts to change the fundamental charter inherited from the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet – and reformed dozens of times –, which will ultimately remain in force. The first, with a deeply progressive and avant-garde text in aspects such as the gender or environmental perspective; the second, markedly conservative and continuityist. Between them, only a year and three months have passed.
“The moment I always waited for”
In these 15 months, high school teacher Daniel Olate went from believing that “the unique opportunity to take a step forward had arrived,” to feeling “the rage and indifference” of finding himself defending the current Constitution that he always despised. “The story of many people was that of living the hope of changing things, but in the end not being able to do it,” he tells elDiario.es. At 35 years old, the mobilizations of October 18 four years ago, in which he participated from the first day, represented “the moment that he always waited for to change the legacy of the dictatorship and the neoliberal system.” The harshest side of the repression was also unleashed, which left thirty dead, thousands injured, and accusations from international organizations against the security forces for human rights violations.
Marcelo Mello, an academic at the University of Santiago de Chile (Usach), remembers “stellar moments and a very strong epic” such as the first referendum, held just a year after the start of the protests, in October 2020, in which 80% of voters voted in favor of changing the current Magna Carta. For Federica Sánchez Staniak, a political scientist at the Alberto Hurtado University, the election of the 150 members of the first Constitutional Convention, most of them progressive and independent, meant another “peak moment” because citizens understood that the composition of that body was similar. to the common people.
Olate, who is of indigenous ancestry, voted for Elisa Loncon, the Mapuche teacher who became the body’s first president. “The indigenous people had to have a voice,” she says. The election of a Mapuche woman at the head of the process was interpreted as one of the most symbolic gestures of the transformations that the members of the Convention wanted to promote. “That they elected me reflected progress in the struggle of the Mapuche people and, above all, a great dialogue agreement with the progressive forces to support my candidacy,” Loncon recalls to elDiario.es.
“A terrible defeat”
With the advance of the pandemic and the worsening of the economic crisis, “the epic was postponed due to very high levels of fear,” says Marcelo Mella. As the months passed, the process that promised so much began to lose credibility: there were scandals (one of the members pretended to have cancer), internal controversies and many expectations to approve a proposal that, although it was avant-garde in terms of human rights, It was considered “refoundational” because it proposed radical changes in the institutionality.
Furthermore, in these four years the country changed and the citizens’ priorities, too. The slogan “until dignity becomes customary,” which had resonated so much in the streets and squares, gave way to other types of demands, “linked to the security crisis and the problems of organized crime,” says the academic.
In September 2022, the first major constitutional failure took place with the rejection of the first text by 62% of the voters. “It was a terrible defeat, I felt a lot of anger and frustration,” admits Olate, who had voted in favor of that project because he believed that a new impulse would allow him to “break” with the dynamics of the past. “The decision was in the hands of the country and the country itself rejected it,” he says. Political scientist Federica Sánchez, for her part, believes that there was “an incorrect reading in believing that approval was practically guaranteed,” while, according to Mella’s analysis, Chile was always “a centrist country with moderate electoral behavior.” that separates him from more radical positions.
In December 2022, just a year ago, the political class agreed to convene another process, but with very different characteristics defined by the parties: 12 insurmountable limits were established and 24 experts were chosen to draft a preliminary draft on which 50 would later work. members of an elected Constitutional Council.
“When the new process was controlled by all the political parties, that ‘October’, independent, anti-political and anti-party feeling was left without a channel of expression,” says Sánchez Staniak. The former right-wing member Constanza Hube was one of the voices against reopening another process because she believed that the constitutional changes had to be discussed in Congress. “However, the second process was totally different from the first failure in which I participated,” she tells elDiario.es.
Neither progressive nor ultraconservative
The extreme right and the traditional right-wing coalition set the tone for the second and final attempt to draft a new fundamental text. The former added 33 seats with the Republican Party in the elections last May and the latter, 11 more. It was the same country that only a year and a half earlier, like a pendulum, had given victory to the progressive Gabriel Boric in the presidential elections against the far-right José Antonio Kast.
“With the result of the election of councilors, I already imagined that this right-wing majority would make it very difficult to reach important agreements for the left,” the vice president of the Constitutional Council, the socialist Aldo Valle, tells elDiario.es. And he adds: “I maintained hope because it was necessary and more democratic to look for links and until well into the process I did not want to admit the possibility of a new failure.”
The result of six months of work by the Council was a text with a deep conservative imprint, robust in terms of security and with controversial clauses such as the immediate expulsion of immigrants in situation. “It has been a very rigorous, serious and prudent process; a very institutional process and respectful of traditions, which was what many people expected, unlike the previous one,” counselor Gloria Hutt, representative of the right-wing coalition Chile Vamos, defends elDiario.es.
Experts agree that political forces did not understand that a new constitutional project requires robust majorities. According to Federica Fernández, “there was a lack of understanding that citizens do not want an extremely progressive proposal, nor an ultra-conservative one.” Aldo Valle adds: “The right fell into the same error that they attributed to the left in the previous process.”
“Pinochet’s Constitution” or conservative Constitution
The direction that the process took has been so paradoxical and twisted that it exchanged the positions that political forces have historically maintained on the current Constitution.
While the extreme right and various sectors of the traditional right, staunch defenders of the current text, have now defended a new proposal, those who had always insisted on a new project have now opted to maintain the current fundamental law, which they have rejected for decades. “I voted against because the new text does not change anything and is even more regressive,” says Daniel Olate.
The choice between “Pinochet’s Constitution” or the one pushed by the extreme right left the equation unbalanced. 55% of citizens favored the option against the new proposal. In Hube’s words, whatever happens on December 17, “’Octoberism’ has lost.”
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