The ultra-conservative right will lead Chile’s new draft constitution.
Photo: AFP – Agency AFP
After the elections on Sunday, the first reading was as follows: Chile has made a huge contradiction to a country. How was it possible that the Republican Party, which from the beginning had been most opposed to a Constituent Assembly because it preferred to keep the document inherited from the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, ended up leading the process of drafting the new Constitution left-wing parties and with a progressive government?
“It’s a big paradox: They have always been against the constitutional process and today they have the ability to write whatever constitution they want,” said Claudia Heiss, director of the political science program in the Faculty of Government at the University of Chile the BBC.
On Sunday, the far-right Republican Party won the majority of votes in elections to elect the 51 members of the Constitutional Council, the body responsible for discussing and approving the new constitutional text before it is put to a popular vote. On Monday, a recent update from Chile’s electoral service (Servel) revealed that the Republicans would have 23 advisers instead of the 22 announced over the weekend. If you add them to the 11 council members of the “Chile Seguro” coalition, also from the right, the conservatives will dominate the body with 33 out of 51 votes.
Thus, the Chilean right will have autonomy to approve a proposed constitution at will, as the deliberative process allows for a magic number of 31 council members to obtain a majority. Although contradictory from the start, this result comes as no surprise to analysts and scholars of the Chilean process. “It is surprising because of the overwhelming victory of the extreme right. A victory for the Republican Party was expected, but not by that large a margin,” says Alejandro Olivares, an academic at the Universidad Mayor de Chile.
One should not be outraged by the outcome and the turn the country seems to have taken given the full panorama since the beginning of this story. Sociologist Jorge Galindo did the exercise in The country of Spain, where he explained that while the October 2020 elections won an overwhelming 78% yes to a constitutional process, i.e. the vast majority wanted a constitutional change, only 38% of Chileans eligible to vote did so. They made. It is the most important piece of information to understand Chile today and why the process has failed so far.
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With that overwhelming 78% election result, the left was confident that the country wanted a constitutional change. But that mobilization in October 2020 was one thing, and representing the people at that first constitutional convention to draft the document was quite another. In Galindo’s words, “they confused mobilization with representativeness, entrusting the future of the constitutive process to a text written by the mobilized, but which had to be approved by everyone,” the expert points out. The Left made a huge mistake, believing when they read that number that the country had given them the validation to write whatever it was, completely ignoring other sectors along the way. Olivares agrees.
“When the previous convention won, whose constitutional proposal was rejected a few months ago, many left-wing conventions said more, fewer words, that ‘the citizens elected them and they didn’t need to have a dialogue with other political forces, which were minimized’,” in reference on the rights. This was a big mistake, since the draft constitution that emerged from this convention was a maximalist project that, at the same time, did not take into account the opinions of some sectors. That was the basis for it being rejected by many actors,” explains Olivares.
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But it’s not just a reflection of the experts. Chilean President Gabriel Boric was perhaps the one who understood best that he cost not only last weekend’s council elections but even last weekend’s referendum for not building bridges to listen to other voices first text of the new constitution.
On Sunday, after the defeat, the president urged the Republican Party “not to repeat the same mistakes” made by the left. “By that he means not to repeat the mistakes of the Convention, which by a large majority has passed its steamroller and has not initiated a dialogue with the sectors. What confused them was that the mandate they were elected for was not a mandate to do what they wanted, but a mandate to also include minorities in the process,” says Olivares.
In the wake of the left’s defeat and the right’s devastating victory, some have all but suggested that the country must “build a grand coalition of the center,” like former presidential candidate and former Attorney General Carlos Maldonado, put it down. Olivares believes that’s out of the question given Sunday’s results. “Citizens could have opted for a more civil right, but they voted for a more right-wing option. The same thing happened with center left,” says Olivares. In other words, the trend is for votes to move away from the middle and toward the extremes, even though the options for the middle were there. The expert adds that most of the center’s proposals are “opportunistic” and come from people trying to act as a “bridge” in the country.
What remains for Chile is to trust that the Republican Party, as Boric says, will not make the same mistakes as the left and build bridges of dialogue with minorities in order to finally formalize a new constitution. “It is a big challenge for José Antonio Kast (party leader). It’s pretty extreme in a lot of ways. Some are human rights deniers, there are even flat earthers, to put it in the extreme. They were against the constitutional process from the start. Kast will have to moderate them and use that as a sign that he too can be moderated,” says Olivares.
“When he comes to dialogue, he will be able to present himself as the candidate who, although he was in favor of keeping the previous constitution, has led this other process that is thinking about the unity of the country. If he manages to combine this part well, it will give him the moderation credentials he needs to become the big option to become president in the next elections,” the analyst concludes.
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