• Chile Former presidents lead the way: a new Constitution cannot work in a climate of division and hatred

Chile

looked back this Monday and saw a draft Constitution that will remain just that: draft.

And he looked ahead and saw a roadmap: government negotiation with the right-wing and center-left opposition,

consensus to reach moderation

and a much smaller weight of the independents and the conventionalists of the original peoples in the drafting of the new text.

Chile saw, above all, what was impossible to see three years ago: a transversal consensus in the political class about the need to have a new Fundamental Law.

But no longer the one that was buried on Sunday with 62 percent of the votes.

The strengthening of the Chilean peso and the rise in the stock market marked a spring day in Chile, a pivotal Monday in which what happened, why it happened and what should happen from now on were discussed.

For one sector, the victory of "rejection" is a triumph over "Octobrism", which is how the most radical sectors of the social insurrection movement that began on October 18, 2019 are known in Chile. A movement that marked the beginning from

Gabriel Boric

's path to La Moneda Palace, because it was the current president who led an agreement so that the pressure would be released through the promise of a new Constitution.

"The magnitude of the defeat suffered by the ruling party supposes a very important lesson for democracy: you cannot bet on the use or exploitation of violence, no matter how legitimate the desired end may seem," analyst Max wrote in "La Tercera". Colodro.

"The constituent process that yesterday ended up defeated could never get rid of that violent origin."

Jaime Bordel, a Spanish political scientist who lived for many years in Chile, believes that the overwhelming rejection of the proposed text is due to three factors: "

The mistrust generated

towards the constituent body during the process of drafting the text, the defamatory campaigns orchestrated from the hardest sectors of the right and the mobilization in favor of the 'Rejection' of an important part of the center-left".

The packaging of the text damaged even more than its content, Bordel added to EL MUNDO: "A deputy invented that he had cancer and had to leave his seat, another voted a motion from the shower. There was a series of behaviors that were not at the height and generated an

adverse climate

for the convention".

"A Deep Defeat"

The electoral mobilization - 85 percent turned out to vote, a triumph for the compulsory suffrage system - left even those most attached to the proposed text without arguments.

"What happened yesterday was a defeat based on individual and collective errors that postpones the recognition of the Original Peoples," Elisa Loncon, Mapuche leader and first president of the Constitutional Convention, wrote on twitter.

Boric, at 36, the youngest president in Latin America,

ran out of youth this Sunday,

said analyst Paula Escobar.

Leader of the government furthest to the left since that of Salvador Allende in the 1970s, Boric must now "excite rather than alienate opponents and address the fears of those who voted 'Rejection,'" but also "contain the enormous frustration of those who They voted 'I approve'".

The president met this Monday with his political hard core.

A change in key government positions is

imminent

, to which various sectors are calling for more maturity and experience.

Governing in the midst of a crisis and a constituent process meant that, in six months, Boric suffered wear and tear equivalent to two years.

To stop this deterioration is that the former student leader has been talking to former president

Ricardo Lagos

, a social democrat assimilable to the more classic PSOE, who behind the scenes and without clearly manifesting himself was leading the "rejection".

Chile cannot create a new Constitution in a climate of "hatefulness", he alleges.

Thus, the center-left (socialists and Christian Democrats) of the former Coalition gains new strength, the Communist Party loses influence and Boric is forced to negotiate with everyone.

Also with the center-right and the right,

which has already made it clear that he wants a new Constitution, although also that the president must pay the political cost of the defeat: this Monday his representatives did not go to the meeting called at the Palacio de La Currency.

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