The “I approve” of the New Constitution moved away from that 80% of those of us who voted in 2020 for the changes. 58% say they are afraid and not enthusiastic.
The bad thing about the proposed constitutional text is not only that it promises changes with errors, inadequacies, doubts, uncertainties, and deadlines that generate rejection from respectable independent and left-wing people.
The most serious thing is that it promises transformations that give the country illusions in a very complicated political process that will slow down the changes far beyond what was promised. It is serious because if to obvious political imperfection is added a process of hasty changes, an illusory short-termist discourse and totalising promises, the result is always citizen disillusionment with politics because the illusion and the appetite for change are not always the same.
Many people on the left fear that if Boric wins with his proposal for a New Constitution, the process of transformations that we support will stagnate.
President Boric proposes a New Constitutional Convention if the rejection wins. Boric opens an extraordinary opportunity to get the changes right. A proposal to make a better New Constitution would allow us to re-engage the original 80% and do it well, taking advantage of the lessons learned from the work and debate of the recent Constituent Convention.
History (and not me) has repeatedly shown that haste, maximalism, reaching for the sun with one’s hands, ends in disillusionment, electoral apathy and the return of the right to the leadership of social change. For this reason, the most extreme right wing takes the stage in the hope that once the New Constitution is approved, triumphalism, exaggerations, will frustrate the spirit of transformation.Will frustrate the spirit of transformation.
That is why I affirm that the Constituent Convention’s proposal for a New Constitution has put at risk the process of change that the country wants and urgently needs. If the I approve and there is disillusionment, the most conservative right wing would find the electoral recovery that it does not have today. The extreme right is without a rallying point. The right-wing sectors that Kast in his primaries, assumed that Pinochet’s Constitution is dead, even that of Lagos. That less conservative right, if the rejection wins, will join the change of a New Convention because they know that if they do not do so they will sink because they will not elect parliamentarians, mayors or governors because the country wants change. They will join out of principle or opportunism, but they will join. A New Constitutional Convention, post-rejection, allows us to demand them in front of the country.
There is a majority that is dissatisfied with what we failed to do in our Concertación governments and they are passionately awaiting transformations, so why do 58% say they are afraid of the triumph of approval? It is because some have read the text and do not like it, and others reject the excessive language, the vociferous ultra-celebrations, the aggressive promotion, the stigmatising climate, the disqualification of people who express the slightest criticism of the New Constitution. How they will lie about me in order to nullify my arguments along these lines.
How can they say that I like Pinochet’s Constitution when I was registered as No. 11.076 in the Valech Report on Torture and Political Imprisonment? But that is the reductive central argument of “I approve”. They say to me: “You are with the “Apruebo” or with the Constitution of the Dictatorship or the one they call the one made up by Lagos”.
But the President, by proposing a possible new Convention, put an end to the “all or nothing”. He opened up the possibility of a better process, which allows us to vote rejection in order to change things for the better.
The solution is not, not to make changes: it is to make them well and resolve everything we did not do when we were in government with the Concertación.
Approval can be won by the emotion of the current period. But today, more than 52% say they reject the proposal that will be put to a plebiscite. The majority still wants a new constitution, but rejects the current one.
constitution, but reject the current proposal in consultation, and 74% say that a New Constitutional Process should be organised.
I am moved by the wisdom of this majority that wants great transformations and rejects the excesses that were expressed in the Constituent Assembly; they declare their disagreement with the excessive proposals for matters that would require a new constitutional process.
They declare their dissatisfaction with the excessive proposals on matters that would require prudence to succeed.
