Plebiscite in Chile: Gabriel Boric, grow up suddenly

The percentage of almost 62% of Chileans who voted this Sunday against the new constitution It was remarkably close to the 78% who claimed this just a couple of years ago, in October 2020. This data concentrates a number of dimensions.

In principle, the simplifications that arose immediately after the crushing defeat of the legislative text to which the center-left government Gabriel Boric has embraced pure voluntarism. It is clear that the result did not constitute a conservative, pinochetist or “right” victory as appropriately indicated by extremes within the country, both the defeated and the triumphant.

Nor was it a product of the fakenewsthe lies of the campaign, a small argument with which the communist partners of the ruling coalition have sought, underestimating the electorate, dodge responsibilities right from the flurry of votes against.

The conclusion of those percentages is that the people want a new Constitution, but have mostly voted in rejection a text that has been abused for legitimate requests of modernization and equality that Chileans, especially the middle classes, had raised in the protests of 2019.

The conventional ones were born from the crest of that rebellion but they were a minority. Some wisdom should have taken this limitation into account. Instead, it acted with the deviation typical of minority structures that attribute fundamental rights ignoring the majority social other. A known flaw in the region but which the government did not observe when they protected the unfiltered process.

From that reality a Letter in relief by the Pinochetista of 1980 was produced that ignored half of the country, left and right. An eloquent fact: the result of the plebiscite was celebrated both by the center-left, a universe to which the president himself should belong, and by the center-right.

Thus, in the text, the coherent needs of social equilibrium and opportunity that the previous Constitution violated were subsumed a series of controversial institutional mutations such as the elimination of the Judiciary and the Senate, the weakening of the role of the Supreme Court and substantially the erosion of the concept of national citizenship which implied the distorted imprint given to the vision of a “multi-national state”.

This point is particularly complex in Chile where we are quasi-terrorist violence – which in Argentina is not known to those extremes -, with radical groups that define themselves as Mapuche. The Charter proposed the hierarchization of the judicial system of the original peoples “on a par with the national judicial system”.

That section obliged the state to finance “indigenous territorial autonomy for the proper exercise of the right to self-determination of indigenous peoples”. The notion that the Mapuche they should be Chilean citizens in every sense it remained in a disturbing eclipse that forced the government to urgently clarify the indivisible nature of the country before the plebiscite.

It is not clear to whom the drafters of the new Charter have tried to speak in this regard. La Araucanía, where the population is mainly indigenous, was one of the districts where the project received a final slam.

With the same exaggerated criterion, the conventional ones advanced on the administration of justice, whose power they proposed to lift it from a Council of Justice, composed of 17 people but only eight judges. The rest, split between natives and a cast that would complete the Congress. The Court would be testimonial without influence on judges and courts.

Those chapters that seemed contaminated by the markets of revenge, removed from the focus the social balances that also included the Charter and determined this predictable defeat who left the Boric government and its promise to transform the country by expanding the rights to health, education and pensions in a state of grave weakness.

The dimension of the defeat now strengthens the critics of the heterogeneous alliance that has come to La Moneda and that has to deal with a economic crisis which is decisive in the spirit of the Chileans. Of the 346 electoral districts, only eight was the I approve. It is clear that it was not just the Constitution that the voters appreciated.

The dimension of the defeat of the project and of the government itself and the lost opportunity, add doubts on the previous agreements between the various forces in order not to abandon the constitutional reform project.

Although the possibility of a rejection of the new letter has not been ruled out, as anticipated by the polls, a smaller difference was expected than the one recorded which paved the way for new negotiations.

Much of the opposition noted on Sunday evening that the reform mood has not dissipated, but for now Boric has a much more limited toolbox. You will not be able to impose the conditions.

On the one hand, its legislative weakness weighs heavily in a Parliament where power is distributed among traditional parties, ignored by conventional ones. On the other weighs the heterogeneity of their governing alliance in which the Chavistas, the anti-system communists coexist with the liberal centrists in the republican sense.

In this sudden growth process, the president who defines himself on the left, but defends the market, private property, fiscal responsibility and was scandalized by the alley of social plans in Argentina, will now have to define his true political identity.

It will have to do it purely for survival strategy and in a country that requires a rather centrist approach like the one put in place for more than two decades by the Coalition that ruled after Pinochet’s nightmare. In this extraordinary agreement, Boric’s socialist leaders coexisted alongside the Christian Democrat center-right, a party that in Chile, among other things, He is clearly Social Democrat.