More than three million chilean, 20% of the electorate voted on Saturday on the first day of an election considered the most important in democracy, in which the 155 people who will write a new Constitution will be chosen to bury the one inherited from the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship.
“The electoral process has developed successfully”, said the president of the Board of Directors of the Electoral Service (Servel), Andrés Tagle, in a press conference after the closing of this first voting day that will continue on Sunday from 08:00 in the morning to 06:00 in the afternoon (12:00 – 22:00 GMT).
The electoral service reported that more than three million people participated this Saturday, which corresponds to 20.44% of the 14.9 million voters who are called to vote voluntarily to choose the 155 people who will write the new Constitution, mayors , councilors, and for the first time regional governors.
Since the afternoon, there has been a great mobilization of voters in the main cities of the country, who expressed their expectations about the process that is opening to get out of a long period of social upheaval in an unequal and fractured society.
“I hope we have a Constitution that gathers the soul of our country”, Conservative President Sebastián Piñera said after voting in Santiago.
The authorities decided on a 48-hour election due to the pandemic, which forced the appointment initially scheduled for April 11 to be postponed. During the night, the ballot boxes will be guarded in the electoral premises and guarded by the Police and the Armed Forces.
Fear and hope
With this election, Chile begins an unprecedented constituent process that generates hope and fear among the population.
“It is going to allow Chile to somehow reconcile us and leave the past behind. It has cost so much to do it and there are many wounds not yet closed”Says Lilian Lavanchez, 65, a social worker who was 17 years old when Augusto Pinochet’s military coup occurred.
But Valentina González, 45, was “It is very scary that it will be changed for a leftist Constitution and thrown for Marxism.”
“It is something very serious on which the country is going to depend. I am quite concerned and I hope that what is written changes the current Constitution as little as possible, which I think has led us to be the country with the best economy in Latin America and a lot of development in the last 30 years ”, he says.
The new Constitution must be completed within a period of nine months, extendable only once for another three months, and in 2022 it must be approved or rejected in a referendum with a mandatory vote.
“Second transition”
This election is the result of the plebiscite of October 25, 2020, when almost 80% of the voters approved to change the Constitution inherited from the dictatorship through a Constitutional Convention made up only of members elected by popular vote.
The vote seeks to channel the anger and frustration of a society that sees in the old Magna Carta the basis that benefits an economic and political elite with a weak State in education, health and housing.
“Chile is playing the possibility of making the second (political) transition, which has taken three decades, due to a very strong trend towards the status quo of the party system,” Marcelo Mella, a political scientist at the University of Santiago, told AFP.
This process with 1,373 candidates will also mark the first time in the world that a Constitution is written by constituents elected equally and will also make history by reserving 17 seats for the 10 indigenous peoples.
Despite the damage caused by the pandemic, which leaves more than 1.2 million cases and almost 30,000 deaths in the country, Chile has already vaccinated 49.3% of the target population and comes to this election in a context of optimism for the boom in the price of copper, its main export product.
The country, which has the highest per capita income in Latin America and is the third with the most billionaires in that region, “is playing an opportunity to institutionalize the demands that arise from the (social) outbreak, such as those that appear strongly regarding the costs of the health crisis ”, adds Mella.
Difficult predictions
Without survey and with restrictions for electoral campaigns due to the pandemic, “There are quite a few questions about the result (…) We do not know for sure how many people will vote”, Claudio Fuentes, an academic at the Diego Portales University School of Political Science, tells AFP.
For Gonzalo Müller, professor at the government faculty of the Universidad de Desarrollo, “the moderate vote will be a majority” in the face of the most radical options.
“The coalitions that offer governance are going to capture a large part of the vote”, benefiting the center-left and the government coalition with a “second wind”.