The proposed socialist constitution was decisively rejected by Chilean voters

• Chilean voters soundly rejected a new constitution.
• 62% of voters rejected the proposal.
• 38% supported it after nearly all of the ballots had been counted.

Following a nearly two-year process that attempted to reflect a wider range of perspectives in the country’s Constitution, Chilean voters soundly rejected a new, progressive constitution on Sunday.

According to the Chilean Electoral Service, 62% of voters rejected the proposal, while 38% supported it after nearly all of the ballots had been counted.

The socialist President Gabriel Boric supported the 388 proposed provisions of the proposed constitution, which would have greatly expanded social rights, strengthened environmental control, and expanded the scope of government responsibilities for social welfare programs.

All of Chile’s provinces, including the more liberal city of Santiago and its metropolitan area, whose voters heavily backed Boric in the previous December’s presidential election, rejected the treaty.

After the polls closed on Sunday, Boric addressed the public in a live, televised speech to confront the defeat.

The Chilean people have spoken today, and they have done so plainly and loudly, according to Boric. “We’ve received two texts from them. They cherish and adore their democracy, to start with. The second is that Chile’s citizens voted to clearly reject the proposed constitution at the polls because they were dissatisfied with it.”

The current constitution was drafted under the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990. The new constitution’s proponents aimed to depart from Chile’s authoritarian past and create a text that took into account the interests of groups they felt had previously been overlooked.

The proposed reform was started in 2020 when the then-president Sebastien Piera requested a referendum on drafting a new constitution in the midst of social unrest and widespread unhappiness prompted by an increase in metro fares in October 2019.

More than 78% of Chilean voters supported a plebiscite that suggested a constitutional reform in October 2020, and they again cast ballots to choose the members of a constituent assembly in June 2021.

The Constitutional Assembly was the first in the history of the nation to contain dedicated seats for indigenous delegates and the first in the world to have complete gender parity.

Supporters hoped that a new, revised constitution would reflect its progressive position.

Additionally, the constitution-making process itself received plaudits from all around the world for providing Chile with an institutional means of resolving a social crisis and for meeting the needs of contemporary Chileans for greater equality and a more inclusive and participatory democracy.

Professor Robert Funk of the University of Chile claims that a major motivation behind the creation of a new constitution was the elimination of Pinochet’s imposed remains of the past.

“The current Chilean constitution was first drafted in 1980, under Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship. Since since, it has undergone numerous amendments, but because a dictatorship enforced it, there have always been questions about it “explained Funk.

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