In Chile, voters said “no” to the draft new Constitution with a clear majority of 62% of voters in this referendum where participation was compulsory. President Gabriel Boric announced Sunday evening his desire to launch “a new constitutional process”.
Leftist President Gabriel Boric accepted defeat, but called on “all political forces to agree as soon as possible on the deadlines and parameters for a new constitutional process”. He is due to meet the presidents of the two chambers of Parliament on Monday, and yesterday invited the political parties to come and discuss with him.
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But the right-wing coalition that had opposed the new Constitution, ” Chile Vamos refuses to meet the president for the moment. She wants to set her conditions for possible negotiations. Chile Vamos will therefore meet this Monday with its parliamentarians, among others, to agree on the follow-up to be given to the result of this Sunday: some are leaning towards a new constituent assembly operating with different rules from the previous one, to establish a new text ; others would prefer to do without, and change the current Constitution with parliamentary reforms.
The extent of yesterday’s defeat will push President Boric to modify his government deeper than he had expected. Analysts already see Interior Minister Izkia Siches and the Secretary General of the Presidency – Gabriel Boric’s right-hand man – as starters.
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The “no” on the front page of the day’s press
For The Tercera the culprit is the Constituent Assembly. The newspaper recalls that at the start of the process, its 154 members enjoyed “greater legitimacy than any other Chilean institution” but that they “disappointed the trust that the Chileans had placed in them”. The Constituent Assembly, by focusing on the rights of minorities, “locked itself into multiple niches, forgetting that it had to represent the majority”.
“What hope at the start, and what a fiasco on arrival”, also exclaims El Mostrador. The columnist also points to the very aggressive disinformation campaign led by the conservative camp. “The Chilean right will now have to come out of the woodwork, warns the daily, because no offense to the conservatives, majority in Parliament, the Constitution of Pinochet definitely belongs to the past”.
It is on the “possible goodwill of this right-wing opposition that the future of the constitutional process now depends”, laments El País. Very bad news for Gabriel Boric. “And a blow all the harder since the young center-left president had conditioned the structural reforms that his government could undertake on the adoption of the new Constitution”.