Consequence comes a yr after Chileans rejected a progressive structure that will have expanded Indigenous rights.
Chile has voted to reject a brand new conservative structure, leaving the textual content drafted through the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in pressure.
With practically all the ballots tallied on Sunday night time, greater than 55 p.c of Chileans voted towards the textual content, in contrast with about 44 p.c in favour.
The proposed structure, which was drafted by a committee dominated by the conservative Republican Social gathering, would have bolstered property rights and free-market ideas and included limits on immigration and abortion.
The end result comes greater than a yr after Chileans roundly rejected a progressive constitution that will have categorized the Latin American nation as a plurinational state, established autonomous Indigenous territories and elevated the setting in addition to gender fairness.
Chile’s leftist President Gabriel Boric, who earlier than the vote pledged to give attention to long-term improvement in favour of additional makes an attempt to vary the structure, mentioned the outcomes confirmed that the nation had turn out to be polarised and divided.
“I invite you to construct collectively a brand new period for Chile: progress for all, social justice and citizen safety,” Boric, who turned Chile’s youngest-ever chief in 2021 at 35, mentioned after the vote. “The nation wants everybody.”
Republican Social gathering chief Jose Antonio Kast expressed disappointment over the end result.
“We failed within the effort to persuade Chileans that this could be a greater structure than the prevailing one,” he mentioned.
The push to interchange the present structure, adopted throughout Pinochet’s navy dictatorship, was set in movement after as many as 1 million protesters took to the streets in 2019 demanding sweeping political and social change.
Whereas Chile is among the richest and most secure nations in Latin America, it has a few of the highest ranges of wealth inequality within the developed world.
In a 2020 referendum, 80 p.c of Chileans voted to interchange the Pinochet-era structure, which was extensively blamed for permitting corporations and the elite to counterpoint themselves on the expense of the poor, working courses.
However the public’s enthusiasm for change waned within the years following the protests as points akin to crime, the COVID-19 pandemic and inflation took centre stage.
Opinion polls within the weeks main as much as the most recent vote had predicted defeat.
“This complete course of has been a waste of presidency cash … it’s a joke,” authorities worker Johanna Anríquez, who voted towards the brand new structure, was quoted as saying by the Related Press information company.
“Let’s preserve the one now we have and, please, let’s get on with the work of offering public security.”