Chile: New Constitution in the Hands of the Far Right

Credit: Martín Bernetti/AFP via Getty Images

By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, May 19 2023 (IPS)

On 7 May, Chileans went to the polls to choose a Constitutional Council that will produce a new constitution to replace the one bequeathed by the Pinochet dictatorship – and handed control to a far-right party that never wanted a constitution-making process in the first place.


This is the second attempt at constitutional change in two years. The first process was the most open and inclusive in Chile’s history. The resulting constitutional text, ambitious and progressive, was widely rejected in a referendum. It’s now far from certain that this latest, far less inclusive process will result in a new constitution that is accepted and adopted – and there’s a possibility that any new constitution could be worse than the one it replaces.

A long and winding road

Chile’s constitution-making process was born out of mass protests that erupted in October 2019, under the neoliberal administration of Sebastián Piñera. Protests only subsided when the leaders of major parties agreed to hold a referendum to ask people whether they wanted a new constitution and, if so, how it should be drafted.

In the vote in October 2020, almost 80 per cent of voters backed constitutional change, with a new constitution to be drafted by a directly elected Constitutional Assembly. In May 2021, the Constitutional Assembly was elected, with an innovative mechanism to ensure gender parity and reserved seats for Indigenous peoples. Amid great expectations, the plural and diverse body started a one-year journey towards a new constitution.

Pushed by the same winds of change, in December 2021 Chile elected its youngest and most unconventional president ever: former student protester Gabriel Boric. But things soon turned sideways, and support for the Constitutional Assembly – often criticised as made up of unskilled amateurs – declined steadily along with support for the new government.

In September 2022, a referendum resulted in an overwhelming rejection of the draft constitution. Although very progressive in its focus on gender and Indigenous rights, a common criticism was that the proposed constitution failed to offer much to advance basic social rights in a country characterised by heavy economic inequality and poor public services. Disinformation was also rife during the campaign.

The second attempt kicked off in January 2023, with Congress passing a law laying out a new process with a much more traditional format. Instead of the large number of independent representatives involved before, this handed control back to political parties. The timeframe was shortened, the assembly made smaller and the previous blank slate replaced by a series of agreed principles. The task of producing the first draft is in the hands of a Commission of Experts, with a technical body, the Technical Admissibility Committee, guarding compliance with a series of agreed principles. One of the few things that remained from the previous process was gender parity.

Starting in March, the Commission of Experts was given three months to produce a new draft, to be submitted to the Constitutional Council for debate and approval. A referendum will be held in December to either ratify or reject the new constitution.

Rise of the far right

Compared with the 2021 election for the Constitutional Convention, the election for the Constitutional Council was characterised by low levels of public engagement. A survey published in mid-April found that 48 per cent of respondents had little or no interest in the election and 62 per cent had little or no confidence in the constitution-making process. Polls also showed increasing dissatisfaction with the government: in late 2022, approval rates had plummeted to 27 per cent. This made an anti-government protest vote likely.

While the 2021 campaign focused on inequality, this time the focus was on rising crime, economic hardship and irregular migration, pivoting to security issues. The party that most strongly reflected and instrumentalised these concerns came out the winner.

The far-right Republican Party, led by defeated presidential candidate José Antonio Kast, received 35.4 per cent of the votes, winning 23 seats on the 50-member council. The government-backed Unity for Chile came second, with 28.6 per cent and 16 seats. The traditional right-wing alliance Safe Chile took 21 per cent of the vote and got 11 seats. No seats were won by the populist People’s Party and the centrist All for Chile alliance, led by the Christian Democratic Party. The political centre has vanished, with polarisation on the rise.

 
What to expect

The Expert Commission will deliver its draft proposal on 6 June and the Constitutional Council will then have five months to work on it, approving decisions with the votes of three-fifths of its members – meaning 31 votes will be needed to make decisions, and 21 will be enough to block them. This gives veto power to the Republican Party – and if it manages to work with the traditional right wing, they will be able to define the new constitution’s contents.

 
The chances of the new draft constitution being better than the old one are slim. In the best-case scenario, only cosmetic changes will be introduced. In the worst, an even more regressive text will result.

People will have the final say on 17 December. If they ratify the proposed text, Chile will adopt a constitution that is, at best, not much different from the existing one. If they reject it, Chileans will be stuck with the old constitution that many rose up against in 2019. Either way, a once-in-a-generation opportunity to expand the recognition of rights will have been lost, and it will fall on civil society to keep pushing for the recognition and protection of human rights.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

 


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One Call, and Many Virtual Dates Later, They Found Love

Jennifer Frances Namuli Kizza was feeling tired after work one evening in March 2021. And yet she still kept a scheduled first phone call with Donald Mayfield Brown, whom she had met through a dating app.

Ms. Kizza, 28, from Gainesville, Fla., had previously given up on finding a serious relationship. But now, as a medical student at Harvard, she wanted to make the time. “It was really challenging for me to find people where I felt like we both had the same goals for our relationship and for what romance looked like,” she said.

Mr. Brown, 31, who goes by Field, was living in Starkville, Miss., at the time, teaching in the English and African American studies department at Mississippi State University and finishing his dissertation research. He changed his location on the dating app Hinge to Boston with the hope of pursuing a relationship while finishing his doctoral degree at Harvard.

Ms. Kizza expected their first phone call to be brief, but it lasted for nearly an hour. The two bonded over a shared Southern upbringing, their families and similar poundcake recipes they were fond of. Mr. Brown’s came from his mother.

On their first virtual date in April, they watched an episode of “Waffles + Mochi,” a Netflix series about healthy food hosted by Michelle Obama.

“Growing up in the conservative Black Belt South, I didn’t want to watch a show with a lot of explicit stuff on my first date,” Mr. Brown said. “I didn’t want to lead that way with the person I wanted to be with.”

They eventually moved on to the Starz drama series “Power” over several more virtual dates.

Before matching on Hinge, the two had nearly crossed paths several years earlier.

Mr. Brown was attending Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar, working toward a master’s degree in history. He left by July 2016 to return to Harvard to start a Ph.D. program, three months before Ms. Kizza arrived at Oxford to pursue a master’s in global health science. That spring, she had graduated from Harvard with a bachelor’s degree in neurobiology and global health and health policy.

In September 2017, she became a Fulbright research fellow in Uganda alongside her father, who received his grant to teach and research the impact of soil pollution. Ms. Kizza, who began medical school at Harvard in 2018, will be doing her residency at Massachusetts General Hospital this summer.

Mr. Brown graduated from Mississippi State University in 2014 with a bachelor’s in philosophy and English. He earned a doctoral degree in English literature at Harvard last year and is currently a post-doctorate fellow at Brown.

Their first in-person date, at a Thai restaurant, wasn’t until July 2021, when Mr. Brown returned to Boston. He recalled their laughter and cheerful banter from that first meeting. “I never really had a date like that,” he said, adding that he was so wrapped up in their conversation that he left his credit card at the restaurant.

Mr. Brown would find more reasons to see Ms. Kizza again. When she needed to get to work for her medical rotations at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, he would wake up at 5 a.m. to drive her so she wouldn’t have to ride her bike.

Ms. Kizza invited him to attend her cousin’s wedding in Orlando, Fla., in February 2022. It was the first time he met Ms. Kizza’s family. Her mother is from Malawi and her father from Uganda; they live in Gainesville. It was a big step, and she knew her family would take it as a sign that the relationship was serious.

In the summer of 2022, Ms. Kizza met Mr. Brown’s parents in Vicksburg, Miss. At the time, she was dealing with her father’s cancer diagnosis and felt even more appreciative of the warm welcome she received.

“It was just the hardest times for my family and for me,” she said. “It just felt like a miracle to just have this beautiful extension of people to support me.”

Mr. Brown proposed last August. He planned a surprise outing to distract Ms. Kizza as he awaited the arrival of a photographer, her friends and her cousin at the Public Garden in Boston. First, they stopped at the cafe L.A. Burdick Handmade Chocolates to pick up her favorite pastry, and then they strolled around the Newbury Street shopping district. When they arrived at the garden, Mr. Brown got down on one knee.

[Click here to binge read this week’s featured couples.]

The couple celebrated their upcoming nuptials with a kwanjula, a Ugandan engagement ceremony, in November in Gainesville. During an evening of costume changes, dancing and gifts presented to Ms. Kizza’s family, Mr. Brown asked to marry her, again, in front of 150 guests.

They wed on April 29 at the Chapel of Memories on Mississippi State University’s campus, a nod to Mr. Brown’s Southern roots and time as an undergraduate. The wedding was officiated by Reginald L. Walker, a pastor at the Word of Faith Christian Center in Vicksburg. The couple asked that the 100 guests be vaccinated to attend.

In her vows, Ms. Kizza recalled their first phone call. “I knew that day, romantic or not, Field was going to be in my life for the rest of my life,” she said.

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