Nearly 3,000 voting centers have opened this Sunday in Chile to start one of the most important votes in its history, in which more than 15.1 million Chileans will decide whether to approve or reject the proposal for the new Constitution.
If approved, the text will replace the current Magna Carta, inherited from the dictatorship (1973-1990) and seen by a part of society as the origin of the country’s inequalities for promoting the privatization of basic services, such as education, health or pensions.
If it is rejected, the current Fundamental Law will remain in force, although the Chilean president, Gabriel Boric, has already announced that he will convene a new constitutional process and that the mandate of the plebiscite October 2020, in which almost 80% of Chileans called for a constitutional change.
The polls will be open until 6:00 p.m. local time (9:00 p.m. GMT) and the result, which is expected to be very close, will be known a couple of hours later.
At the stroke of midnight, the president said in a message on Twitter that “Sunday will be a great day” and was “deeply proud” that society had “arrived here.”
“In Chile, we resolve our differences with more democracy, not less,” he added.
uncertain outcome
Boric, a supporter of the constituent change, traveled to his native Punta Arenas, more than 3,000 kilometers south of Santiago, to vote first thing in the morning and is expected to offer a speech on a national network once the result is known, independent of the option that wins.
The latest polls revealed that the tendency to reject the text continues, but experts warn that the stage is open because for the first time the vote is universal and compulsory and there is a large number of voters who have been absent from the polls for years.
The new text declares Chile a “social and democratic state of law, plurinational, intercultural, regional and ecological”, establishes a catalog of new social rights and establishes that its democracy is “equal and inclusive”.
“There are issues in which the text is one of the most avant-garde in the world, especially in matters of gender equality and protection of nature,” constitutionalist Tomás Jordán, from the Alerto Hurtado University, told Efe.
Its defenders say that it will help create a “fairer” Chile, the main demand that citizens expressed in the 2019 wave of protests, while its detractors argue that it is a “radical” text and that “it does not unite the country.”
