On September 4, Chileans overwhelmingly rejected a new constitution drafted to replace the Pinochet-era constitution of 1980. The Chilean ruling class had conceded the need to replace the old constitution following a massive uprising across Chile in 2019. While polls had suggested that the “No” side of the referendum might triumph, the size of the defeat took many by surprise. The center-left government of President Gabriel Boric, elected in a landslide in late 2021, put much of its political capital behind approval of the new constitution. So the Boric government emerges weakened from the referendum.
Over the next days and weeks, more analysis of the referendum results from members of the Chilean left will be published. This article by Andrés Figueroa Cornejo, published on the anti-capitalist Website KaosEn La Red, officers some preliminary thoughts. The ISP translated the original to English.
With almost 100 percent of the votes certified, and with more than 12 million votes recorded at the national, regional and local levels, Chileans rejected a new constitution proposed to replace the Pinochet-era 1980 constitution, according to the Chilean Electoral Service. The proposed new constitution lost overwhelmingly, with 62 percent voting against it.
Voting in the September 4 election was mandatory at the 38,472 polling stations installed.
In the region of Magallanes, as in all regions, the “No”defeated“Yes” with about 60 percent of the vote. Considering that this is the home region of President Gabriel Boric, with a strong presence of the Croatian community where Boric grew up, it’s noteworthy that the vote flipped almost completely. In last year’s presidential election, Boric won 60 percent of the vote there.
Many different explanations have been advanced to explain the results whose effect is to leave the 1980 constitution intact.
Paradoxically, in the plebiscite of October 25, 2020 that approved the drafting of a new constitution, 7,542,952 people went to the polls and gave a resounding “yes” to the option of drafting a new constitution, by a margin of 78.28 percent to 21.72 percent.
Among the reasons for the victory of the “No”was the multimillion-dollar campaign of terror and “fake news” the No side mounted. The “No” campaign said the new constitution would establish a chaotic regime of expropriation of private property, including people’s houses; the massive opening of borders for “migration of organized crime”; the unleashing of “crisis, hatred and generalized social and economic instability”; “the imposition of an unrealistic, idealistic, maximalist, refoundational, unpatriotic—impossible to achieve and based on confrontation”; etc.
From a different perspective, the “Yes” side lost because it was unable to sink roots into the population and that most people didn’t know what was in the new Magna Carta. In other words, the “Yes” (Apruebo) campaign is seen as lacking, elitist, self-referential, slow, and unable to highlight for the population its most progressive aspects, such as the environmental provisions, gender equality, political decentralization of the country, the explicit recognition of the rights of indigenous and native peoples, labor and judicial reforms, among others.
Likewise, the failure of the Apruebo was blamed on the prominent presence of members of the political class from the former Concertación and the Frente Amplio in the campaign, a political class that had been widely repudiated. [The Concertación was the neoliberal coalition of Christian Democrats and moderate Socialists that formed most post-dictatorship governments.The Frente Amplio is a center-left coalition that backed Boric in the 2021 election.] The mass social revolt of October 2019 repudiated politicians of both the center-left and the right. The COVID-19 pandemic cut short that social movement.
The above underscores the deepening institutional crisis that Chile is suffering—not just the current Government, but the entire established political party system.
In the immediate term, the results weaken Boric’s administration and its plans for reform, which had already been scaled back from Boric’s campaign promises. Boric underscored this himself, when he called the right-wing opposition to an emergency meeting on September 5. He likely wants to offer to trim his reform program to win the right’s favor in a sort of “national unity government” that, at the end of the day, will keep the neoliberal capitalist system intact.
After learning the results, President Boric, as did the former president and serial privatizer Ricardo Lagos, pointed out that “[our] institutions work and Chilean democracy emerges more robust.” He committed himself to organize “with the Congress a new plan that will interpret a wide citizen majority”. He listed some social problems and suggested a Cabinet shakeup. In this respect, it is worth mentioning that Boric, directly, proposed to implement a hybrid formula of constitutional changes between parliamentarians and other actors, where “the Congress is called to be its main actor.” In the October 2020 plebiscite, Chileans rejected this idea (then called the “mixed convention”), opting instead for a constitutional convention composed of ordinary citizens and social movement leaders elected by the people. Yet to Boric, it seems as if the October 2020 referendum never happened. Consequently, Boric makes a very particular interpretation of the vote of this September 4, reviving what was rejected almost two years ago at the ballot box.
On the side of the anti-capitalist forces, the need to continue building in the social territories of the peoples and workers is more important than ever. This political sector was not part of the constitutional process or the plebiscite.
