On November 7, the Chilean left-wing president, Gabriel Boric (Democratic Convergence), will receive his proposed Constitution from the hands of Beatriz Hevia, president of the Constitutional Council, responsible for developing a new Basic Law. In terms of ideas, everything separates them. Gabriel Boric carried a profoundly progressive and social project during his presidential campaign at the end of 2021. At the other end of the political spectrum, Beatriz Hevia, far-right elected official, defends an ultraconservative and neoliberal model of society. What they have in common: they are both in their thirties. Gabriel Boric is the youngest president in the country’s history, elected at 35 years old. Beatriz Hevia holds the reins of the Constitutional Council, at only 30 years old.
Like all fifty members of this constituent assembly, the trained lawyer was elected on May 7, during a compulsory vote. The Council that she chairs is responsible for replacing the current constitution, inherited from the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). For Chileans, this process feels like déjà vu. Between 2021 and 2022, another assembly, leaning largely to the left, drafted a progressive, feminist and social text. But it was rejected by a large majority of the population on September 4, 2022, during a referendum, leading to a new election.
In a pendulum movement, from the left to the extreme right, the election of May 7 marked the breakthrough of the Republican Party (extreme right), to which Beatriz Hevia belongs. Far from the polemical or frontal outings of certain members of the party, “Beatriz Hevia is young, intelligent. She is the affable face of the Republicans,” observes Jeanne Simon, associate professor and researcher in political science at the University of Concepción.
Parliamentary advisor at 26
Elected for the constituency of Los Lagos (930 kilometers south of Santiago), she represents Chile in regions far from places of power. However, she studied law with the elite of Santiago, at the private and Catholic University of the Andes. A campus with a false American feel, frequented by students from privileged classes, in a chic suburb of the capital. Beatriz Hevia is this discreet student, with long blond hair and thick glasses. “She was very serious, concentrated,” remembers Luis Silva, his former law professor, elected to the constituent assembly for the Republican Party.
The student with conservative ideas was noticed by the very right-wing MP José Antonio Kast, future founder of the Republican Party in 2019. At barely 26 years old, she became parliamentary advisor to the right-wing MP Harry Jürgensen Rundshagen (from 2018 to 2021) . They are twenty-five years apart but their families – important breeders from the south of the country, of German origin – know each other well. “We received the same education. Beatriz is a Christian who deeply defends family and life from conception,” describes the MP now allied to the far right.
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