Chile's ultra-conservative Republican Party led by former presidential candidate José Antonio Kast, was the big winner in Sunday's elections to choose the 50-member Constitutional Council. With more than 95% of the seats counted, the Republicans of Kast, a confessed admirer of Pinochet's dictatorship, obtained 35.4% of the votes while the center-right coalition Chile Seguro obtained 21.1%.
In this way, the body in charge of drafting a new constitution to replace the current one that dates back to the military dictatorship, will have at least 33 seats in the hands of the right, 22 of which belong to Kast's party. This is the scenario most feared by the governing coalition of the progressive Gabriel Boric, who arrived at the presidency just over a year ago with the illusion of leading the transition to a progressive constitutional system and which instead remains literally at the mercy of the right as regards the planning of the institutional future of the country.
With 28.4% of the votes that only 17 seats are in his way, Boric in the new Constituent Assembly will not even have the minimum veto power to stem a text that will probably go in the opposite direction to that he imagined. To come out literally annihilated by these elections is also the center-left of 'Todo por Chile', the former 'concertation' of Michelle Bachelet, who despite 8.9% of the preferences failed to obtain any seat in the Constitutional Council.
Boric publicly accepted the election result. "Democracy is strengthened with more democracy, once again the country has shown that it can settle its differences at the ballot box," said the president, who however warned the winners not to make the same mistake made by the first constituent assembly elected in the wake of the 2019 social protests and dominated by the left.
"The previous process failed because we did not know how to listen to those who think differently," he said in reference to the subsequent rejection of the text drawn up by that Constituent Assembly in the September 2022 referendum.
For his part, Kast stated that with the Sunday vote "Chile has defeated a failed government that has been unable to address the security, migratory, economic and social crisis." "A great responsibility awaits us," he added, referring to the leadership of the constituent process that will open from the installation of the Council. "We will continue to deeply love our homeland and act with humility,
responsibility and commitment to Chile," he said in his first statements after the close of the vote.
And Luis Silva, the councilor elected with the most votes in the Republican ranks, said his party would not boycott the constituent process started with the 2019 social protests. "We will not boycott the constituent process, Chileans have our word, but we will not give up our principles," he said. The Republican Party alone will have the necessary votes to oppose the right of veto to any proposal in the Constituent Council but, Silva explained, "we will bring moderation to a process that we never wanted", he added, specifying that "it is a question of starting from the basis of the current Constitution, which is good, and making improvements".
With 99.44% of the polling stations counted, the Chilean Electoral Service reports that a total of 12,415,729 people went to vote for the election
of the Constitutional Council. This is the second highest turnout electoral process in history. The vote was mandatory, and compared
to the last election with this requirement, which was the plebiscite of September 4, 2022, there were 613,010 fewer who went to the polls. Yesterday's elections also mark a sharp increase in null and blank ballots. 2,108,028 (16.98%) cast a vote
considered invalid, much higher than the 200,881 of the last plebiscite. Those who delivered
a blank ballot were instead 565,497 (4.55%), compared to 77,340 in the last electoral process.