The reflux is brutal. Has a very large majority (almost 62 %), the Chileans pushed a very ambitious project of the Constitution reform on September 4, which promised to definitively close the dark years of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Stopped in 2019 by a massive protest movement against a uninhibited “Chilean model” uninhibited at the origin of a social fracture which has become unbearable, the process of constitutional reform had however been rented initially for its exemplarity.
It had been massively supported by the Chilean people, who had approved nearly 80 % its principle by referendum, in October 2020, before designating a constituent assembly extended to many other social forces than those represented by the parties traditional policies. Two years later, the defeat of the APRUEBO camp, embodied by the young president, Gabriel Boric, triumphantly elected in December 2021 but who could not take office until March, is all the more scathing.
lost opportunity
It will be up to the defenders of this deep transformation project of Chile to analyze the causes of their failure in a subject referendum, alas, as for those who led to the departure of the United Kingdom of the European Union, to the Propaganda of the worst and disinformation. The perceived opportunity feeling would undoubtedly be smaller if the voters had voted less to give their feeling on the reform project than to express a economic dissatisfaction linked to the migration crisis fueled by the arrival of Venezuelans leaving a country at , to global inflation or to the feeling of insecurity.
But the victory of the Rechazo camp more certainly translates the rejection of progress which nevertheless enrolled in the sense of history. These are greater social rights, parity, women’s rights to have their bodies, a real recognition of indigenous peoples and rights that feed resistance, or that of water like ” common good “and no longer as a product subject to the arbitrariness of a completely deregulated market.
Because these themes travel a good part of South America, as we have seen in Colombia in June, with the historic defeat of the right, the failure of the September 4 referendum exceeds from elsewhere the borders of Chile. On the eve of a presidential election still uncertain in Brazil, this rejection constitutes the first major setback of a left which had not stopped hitherto accumulating successes on the scale of the subcontinent.
Fortunately for Chileans, their without appeal voting does not mark the final end of the constitutional process. The Chilean right, which campaigned against the project, with the support of part of the center left, has indeed committed, like Gabriel Boric, to put the work on the profession.
This new attempt will have to be an opportunity to correct the errors made during the drafting of the reform project, partly linked to the entry into the stage of politics, however desirable. It may also be conducive to lifting the concerns aroused by a very ambitious text in the light of a country still steeped in conservatism, and to find the compromises capable of nourishing the consensus which was lacking. The Chileans would have a lot to lose if the hope aroused by the first referendum of 2020, then by the election of Gabriel Boric, fell so suddenly.