Chileans have voted again for a more conservative constitution than Chilean President Gabriel Boric had planned.
As the process of writing and approving a new constitution for Chile continued, Boric again found that his country’s electorate is far to the Right of his politics.
The May 9th elections, conducted for the selection of those tasked with redacting a text, have resulted in a conservative majority. The Republican party won 22 out of the 51 seats and other right-of-centre parties won another 11 seats on the Constitutional Council.
This will make it more likely that the Constitutional Council will scrap the more left-leaning provisions in the text prepared by the Commission of Experts, which likely reflects the highly progressive agenda of the left-wing ruling majority in the parliament that appointed it.
The process of replacing the current Constitution, put in place in 1980 during the military rule of General Augusto Pinochet, started in 2020 when 80% of Chilean voters supported changing it in a referendum that followed a period of protests and social unrest.
Boric then won general elections at the end of 2021, with the Left also gaining a majority in Parliament. In September 2022, he proposed a new constitutional text to the country that would have enshrined certain gender and environmental ideologies while giving the executive more power. It was rejected by 62% of the electorate in a referendum.
But he promised a new draft. In December 2022, the parliament elected a new body of 24 experts to write a text based on a twelve-point framework. The Commission of Experts started its work on March 6th and will have to deliver the final text to the Constitutional Council by June 7th.
On that date, the Constitutional Council will begin its task of approving or rejecting each part of the text. The Constitutional Council must approve each provision by a 3/5 majority. Whatever is rejected by 2/3 can’t be contained in the final proposal. The experts who wrote the text may participate in the debate but without the right to vote.
If the text gets stuck between fully approved and fully rejected, a mixed commission will be formed with six members of each body to resolve the controversy and reach a vote of 3/5. If no agreement is reached, the Commission of Experts will have a period of 5 days to draft a new text to submit to another round of voting by the entire Constitutional Council
José Antonio Kast, leader of the right-wing Republican Party that won 35% of the seats on the Constitutional Council, tweeted that despite the victory won by conservatives through landing a majority on the council, the hardest work still lay ahead.
“We can be happy because of the election results but today is not the day to celebrate nor to divide the country. It is time to work and work in unity for the good of the country,” he tweeted. “Moderation, feet on the ground and eyes on the future.”
