The writer Cristián Warnken, founder of Amarillos por Chile, photographed at his home in Santiago. Cristian Soto Quiroz
Being "yellow" in Chile is not well seen.
He will be accused of going through the middle without taking sides.
In February 2022, the writer, pedagogue and journalist Cristian Warnken, a man of the center left, published a manifesto criticizing the Constitutional text that was being discussed in the Convention.
He called it Amarillos por Chile, a provocative decision that soon garnered the support of dozens of intellectuals, former Concertación ministers, university presidents, academics, and parliamentarians.
Amarillos por Chile moved away from ideological extremes and with calls for moderation joined the campaign for the rejection of the new Constitution in the September 4 plebiscite.
The option obtained 62% of the votes and forced the president, Gabriel Boric, to redirect the process under new rules.
That is what the Government is now at, while Warnken demands that citizen movements be taken into account in the discussion.
Question:
Why was the rejection victory so overwhelming on Sunday?
Answer:
There was a disconnect with royal citizenship.
Before the explosion, it was the right-wing elite, the business elite, that totally disconnected from the country.
And now it is the turn of a leftist elite, which is finally the same, only that it changes its ideological sign.
Q.
Is that why the text did not get support?
R.
_
A left over-interpreted the discomfort of the 2019 riots in an ideological key.
They said 'Chileans want a refoundation and we have to start from scratch'.
And it was a wrong interpretation;
Chileans wanted changes, but they weren't up for any kind of political experiment.
There is in Chile a moderate voter, from the center and center-left who has been disaffecting himself from politics and who on Sunday said no to the constitutional proposal presented.
Q.
Do you think it was a text from the left?
R.
It happened that due to the disaffection of the people with the political parties, independent lists entered.
I myself was in favor of those lists and said so, but it turned out that most of them were captured by radical leftist groups.
To this is added that the agenda and leadership were in the hands of the Communist Party.
Q.
Why did the right have almost no representation in that Assembly?
A.
Due to a very transitory situation.
We had been coming out of a pandemic, the right had been hit by the outbreak and presented bad candidates.
It was underrepresented, because the right has at least 30% in Chile.
In the parliamentary elections [held in November 2021] the right wins almost half of Parliament.
Conventionalists did not see that the photo had changed and that the country was no longer in the October key, but in another key.
A Convention of refoundational impulse moved away from a country that lived in pure uncertainty.
People said 'I want changes, but not so many'.
Q.
The convention also had a very bad image...
R.
I was very excited about the Convention.
But the people felt through different acts that the Convention annoyed them, and the boredom they already felt towards the political class moved towards it.
Q.
And how is the process going now?
R.
Boric now has an opportunity to become a head of state capable of convening a great national and political agreement, a leader who unites the country.
What he has to do is not easy.
He has the Communist Party inside the government, which is not going to be so happy that he makes a turn towards moderation.
And many center-left parties that proposed the approval to reform voted rejection.
If there is no deep self-criticism, this government will have problems.
P.
Has the reform process lost strength with the triumph of rejection?
P.
I don't know if today you do a survey if the Constitution is among the people's urgent needs.
We yellows want a new Constitution, but we are part of a center-left political elite.
The Government will have to combine an agenda that attends to the daily problems of the people and at the same time lead the constitutional process.
P.
How should that new Constitution be to remain in the center-left?
R.
Here we had a right in the midst of a dictatorship that tried to build a Constitution from a blank sheet of paper, refound the country from a radical neoliberal perspective.
That's where the 1980 Constitution came from. We now had an attempt in the opposite direction, a refoundation from the perspective of the radical left as revenge for the previous refoundation.
And we go from refoundation to refoundation and from blank sheet to blank sheet.
We could have retaken the Constitution of 25, which was approved by Salvador Allende and also by the right-wing sectors and from there have made changes.
Or take the text proposed by President Michelle Bachelet in 2018. A blank sheet of paper leads you to re-foundation temptation, which is why politics now has an important role to play in getting out of this quagmire.
P.
And where are citizen movements with Amarillos por Chile in this new scenario?
R.
The danger of populism is to use citizen movements behind charismatic leadership, and we do not want to be that.
We accompanied a constituent process and we did not agree with the text that was presented.
The problem is what we are going to be able to do now, because the issue of the independent lists is not going to be repeated.
That will have to be resolved, but I'm not clear on how.
We will have to see how the world of the center-left expresses itself.
Q.
What do you rescue from the rejected text?
P.
The declaration of Chile as a social state of law.
This shift from a subsidiary State to another of law already has a broad consensus.
It is historic that the center-right has said that the 1980 Constitution is dead and that it would agree with the social rule of law.
That is a Copernican turn on the “cavernary” right, as Mario Vargas Llosa calls it.
P.
Why does that cave right change?
R.
The outbreak has a lot to do with it.
Defeats are great schools in politics, the right has been defeated politically and that has done it good.
One part has learned and another has not, obviously.
And this new generation that comes to power with Boric have never suffered a defeat, their rise has been very rapid and at a time of certain economic abundance.
This defeat can be a good school for them.
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