The Constituent Assembly of Chile presented, Monday, July 4, to President Gabriel Boric the final draft of a new Constitution, the result of a year of work launched after the social uprising of 2019 and which must still be approved by referendum in September.
“We must be proud of the fact that at the time of the deepest crisis (…) that our country has known in decades, Chileans and Chileans have opted for more democracy and not for less”, said Gabriel Boric after having received the text during an official ceremony in the Parliament, in Santiago. The leftist president immediately signed a decree calling a referendum for September 4. “Once again the people will have the final say on their fate. We are starting a new stage,” he said.
The choice to draft a new Constitution was voted in favor (78%) by Chileans during a non-compulsory vote referendum in October 2020. If rejected next September, the current Basic Law, dating from the time of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), will remain in force.
In the wake of the delivery of the text, the Constituent Assembly, made up of 154 independent citizens or affiliated with political parties, was dissolved, just one year after starting its work, on July 4, 2021.
Chile defined as an “ecological” state
Seen as a way out of the political crisis of the 2019 uprising for more social equality, the constitutional project devotes through its 388 articles new social rights, the main demands of the demonstrators. In article 1, Chile is notably defined as a “social and democratic state of law”, “multinational, intercultural and ecological”, and “its democracy is equal”.
For a year, the debates were lively within the Constituent Assembly where the independents were the most numerous, with 104 seats, and the representatives of the right did not have a blocking majority. Two-thirds of the votes were needed to pass the articles.
During the ceremony on Monday, supporters of the constitutional change unfurled Chilean and Mapuche flags (the main indigenous population of the country with 1.7 million people out of 19 million) in front of Parliament, to the sound of songs from the time of the fight against the dictatorship.
“It’s a very long job, you have to be patient and wait. It’s the new generations who will reap the fruits of all this,” Diana Diaz, a 75-year-old retiree, Chilean flag in hand, told Agence France-Presse. The long months of work were also marked by the circulation on social networks of numerous false information to the public on the articles being debated.
Democracy in action
“I invite you to debate intensely the scope of the text, but not the lies, distortions or catastrophic interpretations which are disconnected from reality”, urged the head of state, as the campaign for the referendum begins on Wednesday. In recent weeks, the young president (36) has reiterated his support for the draft Constitution, believing that the current Basic Law – adopted in 1980 in the midst of military rule and which limits state intervention as much as possible – represents a “barrier” to any substantive social reform.
Totally equal, the Constituent Assembly also had seventeen seats reserved for representatives of Chilean indigenous peoples, including the Mapuches. For the Mapuche lawyer Natividad Llanquileo, elected to the Assembly, the process represented “the most democratic space we have known throughout the history of this country”.
Two months before the referendum, however, many polls indicate that the “no” (Rechazo), supported by the right, could win. But some Chileans recognize that they have no definitive opinion on the text which will now be broadcast in its entirety.
“It’s definitely going to be a very polarized campaign,” but a “bit more content-centric,” predicts Claudio Fuentes, a political scientist at Diego Portales University. “The ‘yes’ supporters must convince that the text will really change people’s lives, while the ‘no’ supporters will have to attract more moderate sectors behind them”, he summarizes.
