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Chile elects the councilors who will draft the new Constitution after the failure of the first attempt

Chile elects the councilors who will draft the new Constitution after the failure of the first attempt

(By Alfredo Follonier, correspondent) More than 15 million Chileans are eligible to vote tomorrow in the election of the 50 constitutional councilors, who will be in charge of drafting a new Constitution, after the failure of the previous constituent process, which arose from the social outbreak of 2019.

This will be the second constituent process that the country will experience since the return of democracy in 1990, since the first one ended with the failure of the Constitutional Convention, after the wide triumph of the rejection option with 61% of the votes in the plebiscite. last September 4.

Arising from an agreement between the political parties with parliamentary representation, it occurs in a framework of less citizen interest than the previous one.

This low interest is due to the fact that “the agenda was taken over by other issues that citizens are concerned about, including security,” which “played against this new process in terms of relative weight,” he told Télam. Nerea Palma, academic from the Faculty of Social Sciences and History of the Diego Portales University (UDP).

In addition, it occurs in a different context, since in 2019 there was social and political discontent “that had been accumulating for a long time”, but that, finally, the process “was not able to channel”, said the expert.

This previous process was driven by the outbreak of 2019, when millions of people marched through the streets of Santiago and other cities with citizen and social justice claims, and with the request to write a new Constitution, to put an end to the one that has been in force since the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).

Palma pointed out that another aspect that differentiates both processes is that the previous one “proposed a series of changes, beyond good or bad, quite important with respect to the current status quo”, while “the new constituent process is more for changes on a scale smaller”.

“That seems to me to be the result of the constitutional process rejected on September 4, 2022,” said the academic.

However, he said that he sees a similarity between the two focused on the attitude of the Chilean political class, when “trying” to be a protagonist in the drafting of the magna carta.

“On the one hand, the left had a very overwhelming attitude, it did not give space for dialogue and that was quite negative for the (previous) process and now the right is trying to apply that attitude, but on today’s (security) agenda” he added.

The 50 people who are elected tomorrow will make up the Constitutional Council, which will have to draw up the new magna carta based on the preliminary draft that the Commission of Experts is writing, made up of 24 people elected by both legislative chambers.

As it happened with the previous Constitutional Convention, the principle of gender parity will be used with equal proportion of men (25) and women (25).

Among the 353 candidates there is only one independent, two who will compete for seats reserved for indigenous peoples and the others will be part of the five electoral lists: Todo por Chile (center and center left), Unidad Para Chile (most of the government parties) , Chile Seguro (parties of the right-wing Chile Vamos coalition), in addition to the candidates of the Republican Party (far-right group led by former presidential candidate José Antonio Kast) and the People’s Party (led by former presidential candidate Franco Parisi).

For Palma, within the Government of Gabriel Boric there is “more of an atmosphere of caution” with this process, because “the rejection of last year’s proposal was a very important political defeat.”

At the same time, he considered that if the new process is approved and generates changes on a smaller scale than the previous one, “the opposition could say that Chile did not want such profound changes.”

“From this point of view, the Government gambled for an option that it lost and that this new process succeed, if it is accompanied by smaller-scale changes, it would be implicitly bad for the Boric Executive,” said the academic.

Tomorrow’s elections will be with mandatory voting and in case of not attending, people risk fines ranging from 0.5 to 3 UTM (between 38 and 230 dollars).

Regarding citizen participation, Palma considered that it could be “similar to that of the previous process of September 4”, but what differentiates them is that “the plebiscite of September 4 was with a fairly important level of mobilization and there is not the same level of effusiveness for the current election”.

“While it is plausible that we have similar participation levels, I don’t think it will be higher,” he added.

This Council will begin its functions one month after the elections, to then deliver a constitutional text to the citizens on November 7.

Finally, on December 17, a mandatory plebiscite will be held, in which the country will decide whether to approve or reject this new Constitution.

Source: Ambito

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