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An election worker check ballots at a polling station during a plebiscite on a new draft of the Constitution in Santiago, Chile on Sunday.
Photo:
Luis Hidalgo/Associated Press
Some good news for a change in Latin America: Some 62% of Chileans voted in a national referendum on Sunday to reject a new constitution that would have empowered the left to restrict property rights and individual liberty.
President
Gabriel Boric,
who supported the draft, acknowledged the defeat, promised cabinet changes, and pledged to try again to deliver a new constitution. But Mr. Boric won election last year on a promise to upend the establishment, and whether he learns from this political humiliation remains to be seen.
Chile has been a development success story over four decades since it adopted free-market reforms and its 1980 constitution, which has been heavily amended. But that success has also made the country a target of the domestic and international left.
The agreement to rewrite the entire constitution came only after violent attacks on Santiago subways in October 2019, followed by weeks of vandalism and fire bombings of churches and private property. Bowing to the terrorism, Chile’s Congress passed rules for the election of the assembly that wrote the constitutional draft in such a way that extremists were able to gain a two-thirds majority.
The assembly’s final document, released July 4, weakened property rights, water rights, pension ownership and the government’s role in providing security. It would have created multiple nations within the country, each having its own judicial system. A new body known as a council of justice would have invited politicization of the judiciary, and the elimination of the Senate removed an important check on majority excesses.
Voter turnout exceeded 85%, the highest since the 1989 presidential contest that returned the country to democracy. The “reject” option won in all 16 regions of the country, according to a report by
Miguel Ángel Fernández
and
Eugenio Guzmán
at the University of Development in Santiago. In La Araucania, the heartland of the indigenous Mapuche people, nearly 74% voted against the document. The widest margins in opposition were in the lowest-income communities in Chile.
The message to Mr. Boric is that Chileans are mostly moderate, practical and interested in improving their standard of living. If he hopes to salvage his Presidency, he will have to respond to the public’s needs by moving to the center and recognizing interests beyond his base of left-wing urban elites.
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