Lily Verren, Campus Carrier staff writer

Heath Hutcheson, Campus Carrier staff writer

Chile’s constitutional referendum failed on Sept. 4, with an approximate 61.9% rejection by Chilean citizens according to their voting tallies.

Many Chileans, who had grown used to living in one of the most conservative countries in Latin America, decided that a constitution legalizing abortion, focusing on gender parity and social rights was too extreme of a pivot from the current constitution written during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, from 1973-1990.

Protests in Chile’s capital, Santiago, about social inequality and former President Piñera’s resignation during 2019 prompted the drafting process, according to Chilean Political Scientist Jose Miguel Ahumada in an interview with the Al Jazeera news channel. 

“Highly unequal societies invest less in human capital, invest less in education, and produce more social problems,” Ahumada said.

The draft aimed to replace the Pinochet-era constitution that has been in effect since 1980 and has not been revised since 

“Pinochet arranged a plebiscite [in 1988] asking the people whether he should rule for another eight years,” according to the Washington Post. 

A plebiscite is a vote by the entire electorate of a country or district on an important issue, such as constitutional reform.

The Constitutional Convention consisted of 155 members from all sorts of backgrounds, including some lawyers, actors, a dentist, a mechanic, a chess master and a group of left-wing activists, with the largest bloc being Independents, most of whom had very little political experience. 

“The thing to know about Chilean politics, if you go back into the past, is that it tends to divide three ways: left, right and center to an extraordinary degree, more than most countries,” John Hickman, professor of international affairs at Berry, said.

That distinction between ends of the political spectrum in Chile means that if a Constitutional Convention is made up of mostly left-leaning members, then they are unlikely to sway the votes of citizens who identify in the center or right without making some concessions and compromising.

“As I look at the referendum results, it looks like one-third of the population voted for it: the left. And the center and the right voted against it,” Hickman said, “[The vote] broke in a way that’s kind of almost predictable if you have mostly the left writing the constitution.”

The proposed constitution included a lengthy 388 articles and 57 transitional clauses. In addition, it included many unclear terms such as “the right to neurodiversity” and “digital disconnection,” terms that the average social class of Chile would have not been familiar with.

“I think [the size of the constitution] might be a really big problem that people don’t want to acknowledge. I think, at the very least, hopefully the next thing they vote on won’t be as long,” Hickman said, “Like most of the people in Chile who voted against it, I don’t entirely know what is meant by ‘neurodiversity’ [in the constitution]. It’s not that it’s a bad concept, but it’s certainly not one that people are sufficiently familiar with.”

Chilean President Gabriel Boric said in an interview with a local news channel, “The constitutional process, if rejected, has to continue by the terms decided by the people of Chile. Not [to continue tweaking] the current constitution.”

That means that the next draft of the constitution will be a lengthy process and may turn out with a completely different product, one that appeals more to the center- and right-leaning voters in Chile.

One risk that the rewriting process poses is the idea of voter fatigue. 

“It’s hard to tell with a referendum, people can get tired of voting,” Hickman said. Hickman believes that it is not necessarily an inevitable consequence.

“In some cases—we know with presidential elections—people fear this voter fatigue problem. It hasn’t been showing up much. The issue has been refined for people, and it could be that a second vote on the constitution might have it better refined for people,” he said. According to Hickman, when people expect to be returning to the polls, such as in the French presidential elections, voter interest can turn out higher than before.