One lesson from the Chilean plebiscite: greater turnout does not necessarily favor the left. It doesn’t even usually favor the left. Turnout yesterday reached 86%—voting was mandatory. Fines went as high as $184: that’s in American dollars, not Chilean pesos. You need more zeroes for that.
Another lesson is that it is not at all clear that the Chilean people support constitutional reform. The 2020 referendum on whether to write a new constitution received 78% of the vote on a 51% turnout: that’s 40% of the electorate. Voting was not mandatory. OTOH, the 2022 referendum said “no” to the draft constitution by 62% on 86% turnout: that’s 53% of the electorate. If I were a Chilean politician, I would be wary of calling for another constitutional convention.
A third lesson—that really should not have needed to be learned—is that President Gabriel Boric’s margin in the presidential election was more a measure of the extremism of his opponent than a measure of support for his coalition. Boric, a young left-wing politician, beat José Antonio Kast by ten points … but Kast supported banning abortion with no exceptions, denied that carbon emissions caused global temperatures to rise, supported a private pension system that has generated terrible results, and stated that social benefits should be paid only to married women. Plus, his father was a Nazi. (A from-the-Third-Reich member of the Nazi Party who fought in the Wehrmacht kind of Nazi.) Chile in 2021 was not the U.S. in 2021—it was more like the U.S. in 1964, and Kast made Barry Goldwater look like Bernie Sanders.
In the Congressional election, left-wing parties did rather badly. Boric’s coalition of five left parties (the Communists plus four new parties that emerged out the recent protests) won only 24% of the seats. An allied coalition of the traditional center-left (the Socialists, the Democrats, the Radicals, and the Liberals) got another 24%. The official opposition got 44% of the seats, but they can count on support from the rump Christian Democrats and the far-right “Party of the People” to get a majority. The Senate is even worse, with the broader left coalition possessing 38% of the seats against 62% for the opposition plus the Christian Democrats.
(Yes, people, Chile has that many political parties. But at least they are real parties, which makes it sooo much easier to follow than in Argentina or Brazil.)
What do they add up to?
Boric’s tax reform is likely dead, which is too bad, because the country needs it, as I argued here when I’d barely heard of the guy.
The new constitution, if it happens, will use more temperate language. Expressions like “diputados y diputadas” are likely here to stay (although hopefully “los y las diputados y diputadas” will not be) but words like “plurinacional” and “interseccional” and “cosmovisiones” are going to disappear regardless of the substance. The text will likely refer to sexual orientation rather than “disidencias sexuales.” (This is not controversial: Congress legalized same-sex marriage by large margins in 2021.) The use of loaded “woke” phrases and the focus on explicit identity politics was a serious own-goal by the left.
Mandatory voting is a very good thing in and of itself and it does not have a political valence. Chile ended mandatory voting in 2012 on party lines with the right supporting its abolition: that was a mistake. One thing the constitutional draft did right was bring it back—hopefully the experience of the plebiscite means that the right will support bringing it back for all elections. (Note that Chile has serious fines for noncompliance, unlike most countries that require voting!)
Indigenous rights will be the big hot-button issue in any new constitution, even without the “plurinational” language. Araucanía went the second-most against the new constitution (74%), and it is 33% Mapuche. But that could as easily mean that non-indigenous people there reacted badly to indigenous rights (in the face of widespread violence, to be fair) as much as it could mean that indigenous voters swung against the constitution. The problem is that the Mapuche are angry and increasingly violent and the issue cannot be swept under the rug.
Both sides of the political spectrum need to reflect on what this means. The rejection was so sweeping that it is very likely that different parts of the electorate voted against the different aspects of the document. If I were a Chilean conservative, I would try to figure out what the people swung against rather than assume blanket condemnation. And if I were a Chilean leftist, I would not write-off the electorate (the way President Gustavo Petro of Colombia did in a very bad tweet) but also try to figure out what specifically key persuadable voting groups did not like. In other words, everyone needs to get out and do real politics rather than fight crusades.
Finally, one can hope that if there is a new convention, then it will be selected by a better process. The recent one banned elected officials and wound up with a skewed delegation. Any new one should give Congress a role (if not hand the entire task to the legislature) and it should certainly have a small editorial committee.
Oh, and hopefully any new constitution should get rid of that goddamned Senate, there is no such thing as a good senate. But sadly the chances of that did kind of go down a lot yesterday. Ni modo.