With 96% of votes counted in Sunday’s referendum, the rejection camp had 61.9% support compared to 38.1% for approval, amid a large turnout with long queues in polling states. Voting was mandatory. Senator Ximena Rincón, one of the leaders of the rejection campaign, described the victory as “clear and emphatic” and called for a new constitutional assembly. The “approve” campaign has conceded defeat and the country’s 36-year-old president, Gabriel Boric, has already called a meeting of party leaders for Monday morning at La Moneda, the presidential palace. “I am committed to giving everything I can to building a new constitutional path together with Congress and civil society,” Boric said in a televised address to the nation, confirming he would meet with the leaders of the political parties of both chambers. of Congress on Monday morning. People who support the new draft constitution accept defeat in Santiago. Photo: Javier Torres/AFP/Getty Images The 1980 document drawn up under Pinochet will now remain in force and Chile’s future looks decidedly uncertain. In 2020, an initial referendum saw nearly 80% of voters choose to draft a new constitution, but after a grueling year of negotiations, people seem to have expressed their dissatisfaction with the final product. As the results rolled in and the rejectionist camp’s lead grew, scores of ash-laden protesters arrived in the central square in the heart of the capital, Santiago. Some expected protests to rock the capital on Sunday night in the wake of the 2019 protests that kicked off the constitutional reform process. The proposed constitution included a long list of social rights and guarantees that seemed to meet the demands of this huge social movement. It established gender equality between the government and other organs of the state – a first anywhere in the world – prioritized environmental protection and recognized Chile’s indigenous peoples for the first time in the country’s history. The decision to reject a constitution guaranteeing women’s rights and gender equality was made 70 years to the day women were first given the vote in Chile. “This is a poorly written constitution,” said Carmen Fuentes, 61, who voted in a wealthy northeastern suburb of Santiago. “There has been division in this country for a long time and this referendum will not change that.” Many criticized the document’s guarantees for indigenous peoples, which they said would divide Chile. Others warned that the upheaval of the political system was unnecessary and experimental. In the inner city, others were more optimistic that a change would be possible, citing the need to move Chile away from the Pinochet-era constitution and the model it enshrined into a more egalitarian, democratic future. But that future now seems distant. Boric has expressed his willingness to restart the constitutional process, but the basis for reform is still very much up for debate. Some of the constitution’s most prominent critics have advocated allowing Congress to reform the 1980 document or include experts in a new process, but details have been scant on both sides, with neither side committing to a possible way forward.
