New Chilean voters, new to politics

NEW YORK – As early as 2019, when the wave of protests sparked a movement to rewrite the Chilean Constitution, it was undeniable that the country was tired of traditional politicians and wanted new faces. After the May 15-16 election, it’s clear Chileans will have just that: Our data analysis for the Americas Quarterly reveals that Of the 155 delegates chosen to draft the new Constitution, only 34 (22%) had already stood for election, and only 21 (13.5%) had held elected office.

For many, this brood of political beginners is a light of hope and unknowns about the type of government statute that will replace the current Constitution of the time of Augusto Pinochet.

Before the vote, feminist and indigenous groups, students, the left, retirees, unions and many other groups had demanded that the new founding agreement reflect common Chilean. After months of negotiations, Congress agreed to more inclusive mechanisms, such as allowing independent candidates not affiliated with a political party to run, demanding gender parity among constituent delegates in each district, and reserving 17 seats for indigenous representatives.

In a country where only 23% of the legislators of the lower house elected in 2017 are women – despite the female quota of 40% on the lists – we can say that women were the big winners of this election. A gender-balanced constitutive convention means putting the interests of women first. Feminist groups, for example, have developed the Multinational Constituent Feminist Platform, which includes demands for environmental sustainability, social security for precarious workers and an end to impunity for violence against women.

By calling for a “multi-national” constitution, feminists ally themselves with indigenous peoples, who in Chile suffer from deep and widespread marginalization. Very few indigenous people have held elected office at the national level. The indigenous constitutional platform calls for the recognition of the right of indigenous peoples to territorial autonomy, their language and their culture.

Our data shows that not only does ethnicity and gender bring a new perspective to the new constituency, but also that the overwhelming majority of delegates are newcomers to electoral politics. According to the survey of all candidates who have aspired to or acceded to elected office since Chile’s return to democracy, in 1989, 82% of the 1,468 constituency candidates had never competed for a position. And this pattern is reflected in the results: according to the list of winners of Chile Decide, 78% of elected officials were candidates for the first time in their lives.

Excluding the seats reserved for indigenous delegates, there were 138 places at stake for the rest of the candidates. The independents – who compete in coalition or alone – take the lion’s share: 48 seats. And this is the first time that each of them will hold a public office. Together, they are a few votes away from controlling one-third of the convention, and this threshold is important, because any rule introduced into the Constitution will require the approval of two-thirds of the voters.

But independents don’t necessarily speak with one voice, and traditional political parties continue to play a role, although their delegates also include many newcomers. The latest coalition, the left-wing Approve Dignity coalition, won 28 seats, and only 18% of its delegates – just five of the 28 – had run for office or held office before.

The approval list – mostly made up of members of the traditional center-left coalition, the Concertación – was just behind the Approval Dignidad with 25 delegates, but this result is seen as devastating for the Concertación, the alliance that led to the largest number of candidates for the presidency of Chile in the post-dictatorship, including socialist Michelle Bachelet. The Approval List delegation also has fewer new faces than approving dignity: 28% of its delegates – seven out of 25 – had already run for or won an election. In addition, the delegates elected by the approval list are almost exclusively men.

The price of nostalgia, however, goes to the right-wing Vamos por Chile coalition: 43% of its delegates had attended at least once and 57% of its delegates are men. Some of these seasoned delegates began their political careers in the early 1990s, making Vamos por Chile the constituent delegation with the most establishment politicians.

But remembering the past is not necessarily an advantage and the results of Vamos por Chile have been generally dismal. Analysts had predicted that President Sebastián Piñera’s coalition would win enough seats to become the convention’s grand voter, but in the end, Vamos por Chile got a paltry 37 delegates, well below the third that would give them the right to veto.

The composition of the constitutive convention reflects the protesters’ demand to erase all the last vestiges of the Pinochet dictatorship. For those seeking a more inclusive Chile, the new faces lend legitimacy to the constitutional process. And for these recruits, the hard work to earn the trust of voters begins.

Americas Quarterly

(Translation by Jaime Arrambide)