“In Chile, if the new Constitution prevails, the institutional link with the Pinochet dictatorship would be completely broken”

VSharles Aznavour evoked, in ” Bohemian “, “a time that those under 20 cannot know”. In March, in Chile, it was somewhat the same during the inauguration speech of the new president, Gabriel Boric. In addition to being the youngest first representative ever elected, he received the most votes in the country’s history. The large crowd then sang, spontaneously, the famous chorus of the song of the Chilean group Quilapayun, “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido” (“The united people will never be defeated”), the anthem of the years of the Unidad Popular“Popular Unity”the government headed by Salvador Allende between 1970 and 1973.

The name of the socialist president, overthrown during the coup fomented by Augusto Pinochet on September 11, 1973, was moreover the only one to be greeted with an outpouring of applause when Gabriel Boric listed those who, in his eyes, marked the history of Chile. The vast majority of those present that evening, in front of the presidential palace, were not yet born in the early 1970s.

Aged 36, the current president is the child of Chilean democracy, restored in 1988. However, it is useful to remember that it is still largely defined by the 1980 Constitution, admittedly amended by various reforms , that left the dictatorship. And it is impossible to consider Gabriel Boric’s victory in the presidential election without recalling the“social establishment”this “social explosion” having erupted on October 18, 2019, and which is now called “18-O”a denomination corresponding to “Once of September” (1973).

New social contract

This popular uprising spread throughout the country and the massive demonstrations that followed (more than a million people in the streets) had as a common denominator the rejection of the system established by the 1980 Constitution. was chaotic for several months – until the Covid-19 and confinement managed to curb the phenomenon. Meanwhile, in November 2019, the representatives of the legislative power gathered in the National Congress had decided to propose by referendum the drafting of a new Constitution, through a democratically elected Constitutional Convention.

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If, in France, Emmanuel Macron succeeded, in order to be elected, in shattering the traditional pattern of parties, this was more the fruit of a political and strategic intuition than of a progressive social push carried by the political activism of a whole generation. In the case of Chile, a certain youth came to power in March 2022 – the very ones who have been showing up in the streets, politically, for two decades now. The figures of the current government, who represent the avant-garde, are the children of the movement “pinguino” (“penguin”, allusion to the white and black outfits of schoolchildren) from 2006, which discussed the primary education system. These are the teenagers of the student movement that took place five years later, in 2011. These are the same young people who will become parliamentarians, in 2013.

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