The assembly, a hundred people, sings the Chilean anthem in the conference room of a hotel in Santiago, Thursday 1er september. “Not this one”proclaim their T-shirts, yellow, like their caps, their flags and their surgical masks, reflecting the name of their group, Amarillos por Chile (“the yellow ones for Chile”), launched in February, in order to campaign against the new fundamental law which will be submitted to a historic referendum on Sunday 4 September.
Fifteen million Chileans and Chileans, in this country of nineteen million inhabitants, are called to the polls.
“I want another Constitution, but not this one, which divides us. It’s too important a subject, it’s where it all begins and it all ends.”, said Ricardo Quezada, 64, at the end of campaign event of Amarillos por Chile, which defines itself as a group of center and center left citizens. Their posture illustrates what is akin to a slow turnaround at the national level: like a majority of Chileans now, according to all the polls, they are preparing to vote “Rechazo” (“I reject” the proposal, this is the case for 53.5% of respondents, according to the Pulso Ciudadano polling institute), after speaking out in favor of writing a new Constitution, during a referendum, in October 2020.
At the time, nearly 80% of voters had decided and expressed the wish to bury the Constitution inherited from the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) and deemed illegitimate. If it has been reformed on different occasions, this Constitution has been accused of being the bedrock of inequalities of all types, denounced in the street during the vast and unprecedented social uprising of 2019. The way then opened for an in-depth rewriting of the fundamental text, under the pen of 154 elected officials, including a majority of independents, composing a joint assembly, clearly to the left.
For a year, the new text discussed sought to promote a change of model announced in the first article: “Chile is a social and democratic state based on the rule of law. It is plurinational, intercultural, regional and ecological. » The main principles that run through it then include the introduction of social rights, the recognition of indigenous populations (12.8% of Chileans), parity, an overhaul of the political and judicial system. Access to voluntary termination of pregnancy is guaranteed.
“Unbalanced Powers”
For part of the opinion, was it going too far? “I am super in agreement with social rights. But not with the powers that are given to the natives. If they have that many, then there is no more equalitysays Marcela Retamal, a 35-year-old worker from Amarillos por Chile. The powers are unbalanced, the room [dite « des régions », en remplacement du Sénat] does not have to be adds Ricardo Quezada.
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