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A demonstrator holds a placard reading "New Constitution now" during a protest against Chile's government in Santiago.
How much (constitutional) change will Chileans get?
A year and a half after millions poured into the streets of Santiago to protest inequality and the vestiges of the Pinochet dictatorship, Chileans voted this weekend to elect the 155 people who will rewrite the country's constitution.
The question now is not whether the people want change — clearly they do — but rather how much change their representatives can agree on. Overall, the new text is widely expected to beef up the role of the state in a country where a strong private sector made Chile one of Latin America's wealthiest yet also most unequal nations.
Here are a few things to bear in mind as the constitutional rewrite process kicks off.
Voters punished the right — and the broader political establishment. Sunday night was a shock for Chilean conservatives: the ruling center-right coalition got fewer delegates than their traditional leftist rivals, and failed to secure the one-third of the vote necessary to veto any radical changes. Meanwhile, independent candidates, most of them left-leaning, won a surprising majority in a similar rejection of the entire political class.
In theory, this shift to the left should pave the way for bold reforms in Chile's next constitution. But getting so many independents, many of whom are single-issue advocates, to agree on a wide range of reforms with delegates from the establishment leftist parties they no longer support, will be an uphill climb that adds uncertainty to the process. And if no consensus is reached within 12 months, the charter will stay as is, setting up the country for fresh unrest.
So, where can they find common ground? Most delegates want Chile to have a more robust social safety net. That means spending a lot more on education, healthcare and pensions, which until now have been mostly privatized alongside other essential public services like water. They will also push for the new constitution to enshrine equal rights for women, and to recognize the land rights of indigenous Chileans, who make up about 10 percent of the population but are not even mentioned in the current charter.
It may be harder, though, to get the needed two-thirds majority support on more radical proposals such as mandatory royalties on mining — which is a big deal for the world's top copper producer — or imposing minimum spending thresholds on social programs. Allowing the state to nationalize most private corporations is also unlikely to pass.
And more elections are coming... In late November, Chileans will go to the polls for the third time in little over a year, this time to vote for president, with the deeply unpopular incumbent Sebastián Piñera unable to run for another four years because of term limits. So far no major party has yet decided on a candidate, but constitutional reform will probably be a major campaign issue, especially if little progress has been made on the text by then.
Meanwhile, the rest of South America will be paying close attention. The results of Chile's constitutional election show that the pandemic has done little to calm the wave of social unrest that swept the continent months before COVID. There have been protests about socio economic issues across the Andean region, and strikers in Colombia are currently demanding a lot of the same things as the Chileans did.
What Chile has done is somewhat unique: the people wanted change, and they were given the opportunity to have their say. Chile's constituent assembly was entirely elected by popular vote, and the first ever in the world with gender parity. If the delegates get the job done on time and the text is ratified in a second referendum sometime next year, it'll send a clear message that change can be pursued through the democratic system without having to resort to permanent upheaval.Chile wants a new constitution. Here's why.
In a national referendum on Sunday, Chileans overwhelmingly voted in favor of a new constitution. But, why are people in this oasis of political stability and steady economic growth in South America willing to undo the bedrock of the system that has allowed Chile to prosper for so long?
The back story. The current charter dates from forty years ago, when Chile was still ruled by despot General Augusto Pinochet. It was approved in a 1980 national plebiscite which the opposition says was rigged.
Drafted largely by US-educated Chilean neoliberal economists, the Pinochet-era constitution gave a huge role to the private sector in state affairs. Schools, pensions and healthcare were all partially privatized. Chile soon became the most business-friendly South American nation, and its accumulated GDP expanded by an astounding 800 percent from 1990 to 2018.
However, the 1980 charter largely concentrated power in the hands of Santiago's political and business elite, who prospered handsomely while the rest of the country got left behind. Over time, the stark disparity bred strong resentment among working-class Chileans fed up with substandard public healthcare and education, students who can't afford rising tuition fees, the elderly who barely get by on meager public pensions, and indigenous people, who account for 9 percent of the population yet have no cultural or land rights.
The four-cent spark for it all. A year ago, the residents of Santiago took to the streets to reject a $0.04 fare hike for the capital's metro rail system. It was an explosion of anger that caught conservative President Sebastián Piñera by surprise. One of the main demands of the marches — some of which turned violent — was a new constitution.
Piñera, backed into a corner, agreed to hold a referendum, and a year later, three quarters of Chileans voted "yes" to rewriting the country's charter. They also supported electing a constituent assembly in April, which will set to work on a draft that could be ready for popular approval by 2022.
The region is watching. For decades Chile has been an outlier in South America, boasting political stability and steady economic growth in a region long mired in conflict and economic crises. But now that this unequal prosperity has, ultimately, come at a clear political cost, the country's next steps will be closely scrutinized.
Proponents of the referendum envision a new charter that will enshrine more basic rights for all Chileans (especially free higher education and healthcare, as well as affordable housing and transportation), limit the role of the private sector, and expand public welfare to create a more equal society. They argue that while Chile's economy has been cruising for decades, growth has not trickled down to the majority of the people. (In 2018, the income inequality gap between the top and bottom 10 percent was 65 percent higher than the average among the 37 OECD member countries — and that was before COVID-19.)
Although the reforms enjoy widespread support among Chileans, opponents say that implementing a robust social safety net could stifle the country's economic prospects, and open up Chile to the political and economic upheavals that have plagued neighbors like Argentina.
Looking ahead. After decades as a regional model for political stability and economic growth, Chile has discovered it can no longer maintain both. With such high stakes, will the new constitution will help the country's leaders find ways to maintain economic success while ensuring greater equity for the 99 percent, or will this end up being a permanent tradeoff?