In overwhelming numbers yesterday – the “no” vote was 62% - the people of Chile voted to reject a draft Constitution that would have been one of the most progressive national charters in the world, enshrining gender parity and a range of social, indigenous and environmental rights. The failure will not mean the end of the process. Some 80% of Chileans previously voted to replace the Constitution inherited from the Pinochet era. Yet for now, it is back to the drawing board for a left that has been weakened by the outcome.

Yesterday’s vote dealt a significant blow to the recently elected government of Gabriel Boric which supported the draft Constitution and the process that generated it. Yesterday, Boric was trying to make the best of it:

"We have to listen to the voice of the people. Not just today, but the last intense years we've lived through," Boric said. "That anger is latent, and we can't ignore it." The president said he would work with congress and different sectors of society to draft another text with lessons from Sunday's rejection. Centre-left and right wing parties that promoted the reject campaign, have also agreed to negotiate to prepare a new text.

Yesterday’s failure in Chile will sound a warning to the other left wing governments recently elected across the region. Mexico, Argentina and Bolivia elected left-wing leaders between 2018 and 2020, and Peru, Honduras, and Colombia have done likewise in the past 12 months. Moreover in Brazil, the polls indicate that the veteran left wing leader Lula Inacio Lula da Silva is likely to win next month’s national election, finally ridding the country of the Bolisario administration.

Unfortunately, yesterday’s rejection supports the contention by the UK Financial Times and others that the region’s pivot leftwards has been a revolt against the incumbents, rather than an embrace of socialism per se. Across the region, the left has been propelled into office by a desperately impatient populace seeking immediate relief on cost of living issues and rising crime levels. Reportedly, voters want results, not ideology. If only it were that easy. Arguably, only a change from free market ideology can hope to deliver significantly different results.

Meaning: Despite the rise of left wing populism, there are no quick fix solutions available. Across Central and South America, left wing leaders have inherited low growth economies beset by corruption, entrenched social inequality, substandard infrastructure and health and education services that were never designed to meet the needs of most of the population. To assume that more of the same neo-liberal economic policies that generated these problems could somehow magically resolve them in future, is madness. Yet the main alternative - a state-led economic response - is likely to be resisted by the same fearful middle classes and self-interested elites that yesterday, helped to defeat the draft Constitution in Chile.

So what went wrong with yesterday’s vote? To be glib, one could say that if any plan contains 388 principles, almost everyone will be able to find five or ten of them that they don’t like. This draft document had sweeping, world-first ambitions:

It would have legalized abortion, mandated universal health care, required gender parity in government, given Indigenous groups greater autonomy, empowered labour unions, strengthened regulations on mining and granted rights to nature and animals. In total, it would have enshrined over 100 rights into Chile’s national charter, more than any other constitution in the world, including the right to housing, education, clean air, water, food, sanitation, internet access, retirement benefits, free legal advice and care “from birth to death.”

And it would have eliminated the Senate, strengthened regional governments and allowed Chilean presidents to run for a second consecutive term. The text included commitments to fight climate change and protect Chileans’ right to choose their own identity “in all its dimensions and manifestations, including sexual characteristics, gender identities and expressions.”

In the end, this programme proved to be too drastic a formulation for the voters clustered around the centre of the political spectrum. The draft document came to be widely seen as a partisan project of the left, a perception fuelled by a few well-publicised incidents of flamboyance and deception. In particular, the leaders of the “reject” camp homed in on the proposals to grant virtual self-government to a range of indigenous groups, who would have been empowered to operate their own court systems. Tellingly, the “reject” vote was strongest in five regions located in the south of the country, where logging companies have regularly been in direct and violent conflict with indigenous groups.

On this and other issues, the voters in the centre proved to be easily spooked. As even the New York Times conceded:

There was widespread uncertainty about the implications and cost [of the draft document] some of which was fuelled by misleading information, including claims that it would have banned homeownership and that abortion would have been allowed in the ninth month of pregnancy.

Not all of the opposition however, could be attributed solely to self-interest, elitism and misinformation. While readily over-stated, the added cost of implementing (all of) the proposals (all at once) would have been substantial. Even so, the gradual phasing in of the extra spending on social services would have been coming off a very low base:

Economists expected the proposed changes to cost from 9 percent to 14 percent of Chile’s $317 billion gross domestic product. The country has long been one of the lowest relative spenders on public services among major democracies.

Looking ahead as to what comes next... No doubt, Boric and his colleagues will take a further hit to their popularity, which has been in sharp decline since his election. Yesterday, he was promising Cabinet changes. The process for writing a new text to replace the Pinochet era document will now be returned to the arena of traditional politics. As in:

The left-wing president said he would work with congress and different sectors of society to draft another text with lessons from Sunday's rejection.Centre-left and right wing parties that promoted the reject campaign, have also agreed to negotiate to prepare a new text.

For now at least, Chile’s experiment in constituent assembly direct democracy is over. The “ approve” bloc will have to salvage as much as they can from the wreckage.

Footnote: As mentioned, the same legacy problems that confront Chile are evident elsewhere in Central and South America. So far, Colombia’s newly elected left wing leader Gustavo Petro has proceeded cautiously. From the outset, he has engaged in seeking multi-party solutions, and has appointed Jose Antonio Ocampo, a globally well-known development economist, as finance minister. Colombia is pursuing much the same social agenda as Boric is in Chile, yet (so far) the rhetoric at least, has been inclusive:

Uprooting government policies that have kept indigenous people, Afro-Colombians, poor farmers, and women from equal income, land access and development was central to [Petro’s] platform…. Petro…has worked on expanding his coalition in Congress, where his most ambitious proposals must go through. While Petro’s political party, the Historic Pact, made significant gains in the last elections, they still require support from establishment parties Petro has previously criticized, to pass future legislation.

Problem being, the revenue to meet Colombia’s social needs will require significant tax reform, which will be resisted by the same opposition parties that Petro is currently courting :

Among the most contentious bills is the tax reform measure. It is vital to financing Petro’s social programs and curbing inflation, which reached 10 percent in July, the highest rate in 20 years…The reform is expected to increase revenue by 25 trillion Colombian pesos ($5.75bn) in 2023 by hiking income taxes for the wealthiest Colombians, increasing export tariffs on oil and gas, and closing loopholes for tax evaders. The radical change to revenue collection may make it hard for some in congress to support it, analysts say.

At crunch time, it remains to be seen whether this would-be gradualist approach in Colombia will prove any more successful in resolving the country’s problems - or in enabling the survival of Petro’s administration – than the road that Chile has taken.

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