Consequence comes a 12 months 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 in the course of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in power.
With practically all the ballots tallied on Sunday evening, 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 Occasion, would have bolstered property rights and free-market ideas and included limits on immigration and abortion.
The end result comes greater than a 12 months 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 growth in favour of additional makes an attempt to alter the structure, mentioned the outcomes confirmed that the nation had turn out to be polarised and divided.
“I invite you to build together a new era for Chile: growth for all, social justice and citizen security,” Boric, who turned Chile’s youngest-ever chief in 2021 at 35, mentioned after the vote. “The country needs everyone.”
Republican Occasion chief Jose Antonio Kast expressed disappointment over the end result.
“We failed in the effort to convince Chileans that this would be a better constitution than the existing one,” he mentioned.
The push to switch the present structure, adopted throughout Pinochet’s army 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 without doubt one of the richest and most steady international locations 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 switch the Pinochet-era structure, which was broadly blamed for permitting corporations and the elite to counterpoint themselves on the expense of the poor, working lessons.
However the public’s enthusiasm for change waned within the years following the protests as points corresponding to crime, the COVID-19 pandemic and inflation took centre stage.
Opinion polls within the weeks main as much as the newest vote had predicted defeat.
“This whole process has been a waste of government money … 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 keep the one we have and, please, let’s get on with the work of providing public safety.”
