Populism has cast a particularly long shadow in Latin America. Crowd-pleasing speakers proclaiming a new utopia pepper its recent history.
General Juan Domingo Perón spawned a movement in the 1940s, Peronism, so powerful that it has dominated Argentine politics to this day. More recently, Hugo Chávez’s “Bolivarian Revolution” in Venezuela and Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s “Fourth Transformation” in Mexico have seduced voters with magical promises that contradicted the authoritarianism of their respective leaders.
In this unpromising political landscape, Chile’s decision in a referendum on Sunday (4) to decisively reject an impossibly utopian constitution stands out as a notable example of civic maturity. It is a setback for leftist president Gabriel Boric, a former student leader who has staked a lot of political capital on the now-rejected radical project.
Voters were promised, almost literally, land (the project would have guaranteed constitutional rights to nature). The attractions were plentiful among the 388 articles drafted by a specially elected assembly after a year of sometimes raucous debate.
The draft Constitution required the State not only to provide health, education and housing, but also to guarantee the production of healthy foods and the promotion of Chilean national cuisine. Strangely, in a country where millions still lack broadband internet services, it would have guaranteed the right to “digital disconnection”.
However, Chileans realized the utopian vision amid an entirely more prosaic reality of rising inflation, a slowing economy and myriad economic challenges. Almost 86% voted and almost 62% of those voted against the new Constitution.
Such electoral maturity is highly unusual anywhere, let alone a middle-income country. According to a global study by two American academics, Zachary Elkins and Alexander Hudson, voters have approved 94% of the 179 new constitutions introduced since the French Revolution of 1789.
But Chileans have not abandoned the desire to get rid of the original sin of the current Constitution, drafted under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). Colombia’s leftist president Gustavo Petro tweeted after Sunday night’s result that “Pinochet has come back to life”. He couldn’t be more wrong.
“Some limits have been crossed and there is no going back,” said Andrés Velasco, a former Chilean politician who is now dean of the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics. “There will be a new Constitution. The representation of women and ethnic minorities is now rooted in politics, access to abortion will be expanded and gay marriage will remain legal. In values and inclusion Chile has advanced, and that will not change.”
What is likely to follow is a new attempt to rewrite the Constitution. It will right the wrongs of the past by ensuring that delegates to a new constituent assembly are more representative of a country largely divided between left and right. It will still ensure that marginalized indigenous communities have representation, but that representation is proportionate. It will not give single-issue activists an unfair advantage.
A new Charter will likely emerge from this process, granting Chileans stronger individual rights and a greater role for the State in guaranteeing essential public services. In short, something more like a European-style welfare state and less like a Friedman free market. It will be an evolution rather than a revolution.
Encouragingly, this process promises to be peaceful and democratic. Within hours of last night’s referendum result, Chileans across most of the political spectrum accepted the result as fair, made conciliatory statements and began to build consensus for a new, more moderate letter. Even Boric accepted the need for a document “that unites us as a country”.
In their overwhelming desire to reject populism and embrace consensus, expressed peacefully and democratically, Chileans set an example to the world.
