CHILE: Elections of the Constitutional Councilors

On Sunday, May 7, the elections for the Constitutional Council were held in Chile. One of the main points of this council will be the drafting of the proposal for the New Constitution of Chile together with the panel of experts. Currently, Chile still maintains the 1980 constitution, imposed by the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

But Sunday’s election results show the people’s rejection of the country’s politics. It was expected that there would be a turnout of 70% of the eligible voting population, something that was already considered a rather low figure, as it implies that almost a third of the population is dissatisfied with the country’s politics. But the figures were even lower than analysts had expected, 35.9% of the population that was called to vote did not do so. This means that the non-vote/null vote is the biggest political force in the country, above the Republican Party which would have won the elections with 22.9%.

Prensa Chiripilko reports on this situation: “The old society is falling apart. Inflation, the rising cost of living, the discrediting of the ruling classes and their old state are growing. At the same time, the attempts to re-validate the old regime at the service of the big tycoons, bourgeoisie and large landowners, seeking to restructure their rotten State are carried out under the tactic of giving the people “carrots and sticks”, which translates into new electoral farces and intensification of repression with the armed forces, police and approval of “draconian” laws.

However, none of these mechanisms will succeed in containing forever the masses that sooner or later will rise up in new struggles and resistances. A demonstration of this is that more than 5 million people rejected the recent elections, either by not going (it is important to emphasize that these were the second elections with mandatory voting and automatic registration for those who turn 18 years old) or by voting null/blank.

It is worth remembering that the new constitutional illusions process was modified in such a way that, even if the councilors wanted to propose really important changes in the constitution, the “panel of experts” will be who will decide what goes and what does not go in the next new constitutional proposal.”

The panel of experts is a total of 24 people chosen by the current parties in the different Houses who will be in charge of making the preliminary draft of the new Constitution. 12 of the experts were chosen by the lower house of the parliament, they include different graduates such as lawyers or sociologists. On the other hand, another 12 experts have been chosen by the Senate, also including lawyers and economists.

Prensa Chiripilko ends quoting the PCP: “Finally, the so-called ‘legitimization’ as a political objective of the counter-subversive war, in its form known as ‘low intensity warfare’, insofar as it seeks governments coming out of elections as a means of ‘giving them legitimacy’ and ‘authority’ recognized by the people; apart, they say, from ‘serving to satisfy the needs of the people’. Thus elections are, then, an instrument of counterrevolutionary war.”