Plebiscite in Chile: rejection of the new Constitution is maintained and Gabriel Boric complicates

Days pass in Chile, the constitutional plebiscite of September 4 is approaching and the advantage of the possibility of rejecting the new text proposed by the Constitutional Convention seems to be consolidating.

This is what two of the country’s main pollsters point out, who gave their latest public numbers this weekend, due to a law that prevents the media from publishing the results of electoral polls in Chilean territory 15 days before the elections.

Activa Research, author of the fortnightly Pulso Ciudadano survey, is one of the companies that has come closest to the results of the last three trials in Chile.

His latest study produces a 32.9% of the voting intentions for the Approval and 45.8% for the Rejection option. The study also calculates two voter turnout scenarios: one with 64% turnout, called “probable voter”, and another with the turnout of the entire population.

In the first, the final result would be 46.5% for the Approve option and 53.5% for the Reject option. Both figures are outside the margin of error. If participation were closer to the total number of voters, Rejection would increase one’s voting intention to 58.2% and Approval would drop to 41.8%.

It should be noted that, unlike the last elections, voting in this referendum will be mandatoryso it should be closer to holdings like Argentina or France.

The second poll revealed this Friday, and perhaps the most assertive in recent years, is Cadem’s “Plaza Pública”. It was only half a percentage point wrong in the presidential election result and hit the constitutional plebiscite right at the start.

The scholarship attributes 46% of voting intentions to Rejection and 37% to Approval. Putting the results on a basis of 100, the graph shows 55% for Rejection and 45% for Approval, which is a 10-point difference that has remained stable over the past month.

The study grants a range of variation to its calculation, with a ceiling of 58% and a threshold of 52% among those who oppose the text. For its part, the affirmative option is assigned a maximum ceiling of 48% and a minimum threshold of 42% of voting intentions.

Gabriel Boric’s bet

President Gabriel Boric has opted for Play your chips for approval two months ago. Despite the recommendations to maintain greater neutrality and ignore the election, in response to the need to give political validity to his mandate whatever the outcome, the government leader’s project ultimately opted for direct involvement in the process.

For this reason, it is not surprising that the grading for approval in studies tends to be roughly the same percentage as approval for your government.

Nor, that the same investigations show a citizen feeling of “electoral interventionism”, which has led even the Controller General of the Republic to investigations against the executive.

However, the Chilean president is convinced that the option of victory over the opposite option is plausible and there is widespread disagreement with the constitutional proposal.

For this he pushed his parties to agree on a battery of immediate reforms that would be made to the new constitution if approved, in order to get the center-left vote that disagrees with the text. A strategy that, according to Roberto Izikson, director of Cadem, “had no electoral effects”.

And it is that the right and center-left parliamentarians, for their rejection, immediately came out to say that they were asking to “buy a destroyed car, with the commitment that it would then be taken to the workshop”.

The day after

The Chilean leader is likely to face a scenario of high uncertainty on September 5, in the aftermath of the plebiscite, where an electoral defeat would mean sitting down to negotiate a new constitutional process with his opponents, because his center-left government coalition it does not have the necessary majorities at the National Congress.

For its part, “rejecismo” undertakes to initiate a new, shorter process, where “the errors that have been committed, such as the piecework participation of independents, which made the Convention ungovernable, and the over-representation of peoples are corrected . autochthonous ”, they underline Clarione by one of the right-wing parties, the Independent Democratic Union.

The extension of the constitutional debate may mean that Gabriel Boric will face a process similar to that of his predecessor Sebastián Piñera, in which the axis of power has shifted to Congress and the Constituent Assembly, reducing his chances of governance.

Santiago, special

CB