Chile is preparing for the referendum this Sunday (4) on the proposal for a new Constitution for the country.
The more than 3,000 voting points began to receive the polls in the Friday (2) evening, as well as the ballots in which the 15, 1 million Chilean voters will have to mark the “Apruebo” option (Approve) or “Rechazo” (Reject), with respect to the new text.
The polling centers, which will receive security from more than 26 thousand soldiers, will work from 8 am to 18 h (Brasilia time). However, everyone in the queue at the time of closing will be allowed to vote after hours.
“Everything is in order and the Armed Forces are mobilizing to take control of the polling places in the the next few hours, so that we all have a good process”, guaranteed this Saturday (3) the Minister of Defense, Maya Fernández, who is the granddaughter of former Chilean president Salvador Allende, deposed by the military coup that took dictator Augusto Pinochet to power, in 1973.
The member of the government toured, along with other authorities, the National Stadium, in Santiago, one of the biggest centers of country, which may receive up to a thousand voters.
Boric must make a statement after the disclosure of the result
The result of the vote will be known a few hours after the polls close. Chile’s President Gabriel Boric is expected to make a statement on national television, regardless of the winning option.
The head of government, who is in favor of approving a new Constitution, traveled yesterday to his hometown of Punta Arenas, three thousand kilometers south of Santiago, so that he could vote early in the morning and then return to La Moneda Palace.
“I trust in the wisdom of the people of Chile”, declared the president.
The eventual rejection of the proposed text will keep the current Constitution, which is inherited from the Pinochet period, although it was partially reformed after the democratic reopening.
If the “Rechazo” wins, the Chilean president has already announced that he will convene a new constituent process, which will be carried out with the mandate of the October plebiscite 2020 , in which almost 80% of Chileans were in favor of changes to the Magna Carta.
New text has twice as many articles of the current Co Chilean institution
The current Constitution is seen by society as the origin of the country’s inequalities.
However, a report published by Gazeta do Povo pointed out that the proposed new text, typically Latin American, could bring poverty and corruption.
To accommodate dozens of ideas on the left from the political spectrum, the Chilean constituents wrote an extensive text, with 32 articles. This is more than double the number of articles in the country’s current Constitution.
In a study published in 2014, two specialists in political science from the of Michigan, George Tsebelis and Dominic J. Nardi Jr., warned that, contrary to what the Chilean constituents advocated, longer constitutions do not necessarily represent more development and prosperity.
By analyzing the constitutions of 32 member nations of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and their economic and political situations, the researchers concluded that those with longer Magna Cartas were poorer and more
The new text, drafted for a year by an assembly with a progressive tendency and with parity between men and women, declares Chile a “social state of law”.
Its defenders, who focus on the left and part of the center, claim that it will help make the country “fairer”, because it consecrates ra a group of new social rights, the main demand presented in the wave of protests of 2019 in the country.
The opponents, in turn, are in the right and elsewhere in the center and argue that it is a radical text and that it does not unite the country.
