For this compulsory vote, 15 million Chileans will have to say if they accept (“apruebo”) or reject (“rechazo”) this new constitution. “Once again the people will have the last word on their destiny. We are starting a new step,” said the head of state and the Gabriel Boric government.
Le Monde with AFP
The Constituent Assembly of Chile handed over to President Gabriel Boric the final new constitution project on Monday, the fruit of a year of work launched after the 2019 social uprising and which still has to be approved by referendum in September.
“We must be proud that at the time of the deepest crisis (…) that our country has known for decades, the Chileans and Chileans have opted for more democracy and not for less,” said the President Boric after receiving the text during an official ceremony in Parliament in Santiago. The left president immediately signed a decree convening a referendum for September 4. “Once again the people will have the last word on their destiny. We are starting a new step,” said the head of state.
The choice to write a new constitution had been acclaimed (78 %) by the Chileans during a referendum to the vote not compulsory in October 2020. In the event of rejection next September, the current fundamental law, dating from the A period of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), will remain in force. In the wake of the delivery of the text, the Constituent Assembly, composed of 154 independent citizens or affiliated to political parties, was dissolved, a year just after starting its work on July 4, 2021.
Chile defined as an “ecological” state
Given as an outing of the political crisis in the 2019 uprising for more social equality, the constitutional project devotes through its 388 articles of new social rights, the main demands of the demonstrators. In the 1st article, Chile is notably defined as a “social and democratic state of law”, “multinational, intercultural and ecological”, and “its democracy is joint”.
For a year, the debates were lively within the constituent where the independents were the most numerous, with 104 seats, and the representatives of the right had no majority of blocking. Two -thirds of the votes were necessary to adopt the articles. During the ceremony, supporters of the change of constitution deployed before the Parliament of the Chilean and Mapuche flags (Aboriginal people in the majority in Chile), to the sound of songs of the time of the fight against dictatorship.
“It’s a very long work, you have to be patient and wait. It is the new generations that will pick the fruits of all this,” said a retiree from 75 to 75 years, Chilean flag in hand. The long months of work have also been marked by traffic on social networks many info with the public on articles being debated.
democracy at work
“I invite you to debate intensely the scope of the text, but not of the catastrophic lies, deformations or interpretations which are disconnected from reality,” urged the head of state, while the campaign for the referendum begins Wednesday. In recent weeks, the young president of the left has reiterated his support for the draft constitution, believing that the current, adopted in 1980 in the full military regime and which limits the intervention of the State as much as possible, represented an “obstacle” to Any substantive social reform.
Totally joint, the Constituent Assembly also had 17 seats reserved for representatives of Chilean Aboriginal peoples, including Mapuches. For lawyer Mapuche Natididad Llanquileo, elected from the Assembly, the process has represented “the most democratic space that we have known over the history of this country”.
Two months from the referendum, many surveys indicate, however, that the “no” (Rechazo), supported by the right, could prevail. But part of the Chileans admit that they have no final opinion on the text which will now be distributed in its entirety.
“It will certainly be a very polarized campaign”, but a “little more focused on content”, predicts Claudio Fuentes, political scientist at Diego Portales University. “The supporters of the yes must convince that the text will really change the lives of people, while those of the no will have to attract more moderate sectors behind them,” he sums up.