Constituting mistrust – El Mostrador

“Frustration” sprang through the pores of constituent Teresa Marinovic when she referred to her peers at a press point as “Convention that… constituents conch…” denoting in good Chilean, that they are the sector postponed in the writing of the next Magna Carta. Any surprises?  The center-right knows that it has no possibility of influencing the decisions of the Constituent Convention, nor to defend or approach the current status quo left by the Constitution of 80 and maintained by the governments of the Concertación, Nueva Mayoría and the right in the last 30 years. Clearly the elections of approval and rejection in 2020, together with that of the representatives of the Convention in 2021, were a vote of rejection of the citizens against that sector of the political elite for being unionized in their majority as the provocateurs of the social outbreak. The way out? draft a new constitution as the only formula for returning peace through a democratic process that promised a demand for social justice to sectors postponed for years. So far everyone happy…
However, the populist enthusiasm of some sectors of the constituent assembly has generated suspicions in public opinion and intellectuals, about the real capacities to exercise the role for which they have been mandated by the citizens. Skipping several peoples in the name of the people, has been the common denominator of some proposals, which, although they have come from small groups of conventional, such as eliminating the three powers of the state and creating a plurinational assembly of the workers, discredits the legitimacy and transversality that the Magna Carta of all should have.
The responsibility of the president-elect, Gabriel Boric and the former vice president of the convention, Jaime Bassa, who rejected such an initiative, left us all with a brittle sigh of relief to continue in the right direction. That summer of relief of San Juan would not last long, since the plenary approved on Tuesday, February 15, the initiative of “Legal Pluralism”: with this contraption, the Constitutional Convention puts a tombstone to equality before the law, regressing our legal architecture to levels prior to the French revolution. With a differentiated justice on the basis of racist criteria, that is, a kind of “apartheid”, the “house of all” takes on a disturbing resemblance to the sinister mansion.
But we continue to add, on Wednesday 16 was approved in general the creation of a “regional state” to take charge and solve the excessive centralism that Chile has and surely those of us who voted approve, we are going in that direction. But I reiterate again that, the excessive enthusiasm to put it in a way on the part of the convention, is already breaking the brakes, curiously passing by all the peoples, because they are not only proposing autonomous regions, but communes and autonomous territories, where you can move to 30 or 40 autonomous subunits, assigning these regions fiscal and budgetary independence even to borrow internationally, having powers even to change their tax system.
It is difficult for President Boric, because to consolidate his leadership and democratic legitimacy for the first year of government, he needs the exit plebiscite to be approved. However, the “friendly fire” turns out to be more harmful and we see that these proposals such as those mentioned, are being carried by a large part of the conventional communist party, the former list of the people and independents of native peoples who are the ones who are driving this bus in which they like it or not, let’s all go.
From this, several speculations can be made about how a real possibility of rejection in the next plebiscite can be a triumph for sectors not only of the right, but of the extreme left. But what is it going to be like a triumph for the far left? Recall that the Communist Party was the only one that did not join the agreement for peace and Boric was “founded” on the public road, for supporting that agreement by sectors of civil society and that now have representation in the constituent assembly as the former list of the people. Therefore, if rejected, the revolutionary logic would gain more strength, arguing that the institutional solution did not work.
The only thing we can predict and of which we can be sure, is that given the distrust generated by the first articles approved in the plenary session of the convention, it will be difficult to repeat the result of 80% to 20% that obtained the approval in 2020 in the next exit plebiscite, also seeing a worrying and real possibility that rejection will be imposed. Not considering a progressive graduality in the changes and wanting to erase a history of 200 years from one moment to the next, is part of that exacerbated “enthusiasm” of a dominant part of the convention that intends to skip the peoples in the name of the people.
  
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Original source in Spanish