Chile’s resounding ‘No’ shows fatigue with the radical left. Will other countries follow? | Opinion

The landslide defeat of a draft constitution backed by Chile’s leftist government in a Sept. 4 plebiscite was a political temblor that could have an impact across Latin America. It could be a sign of growing voter fatigue with radical ideas, and produce — at least in Chile — a shift to the political center.

Opponents’ 62% to 38% victory against the proposed constitution stunned the country. It forced President Gabriel Boric, whose ruling coalition includes the Communist Party and other radical groups that championed the constitutional text, to reshuffle his cabinet and appoint more moderate center-left politicians to key positions.

“It was a political earthquake, a real debacle, especially for those radical sectors that wanted a sort of re-foundation of the country through a new constitution,” former Foreign Minister Heraldo Muñoz told me. He supported the proposed constitution and his party belongs to the government coalition.

“People from the hard left that made up a majority of the constitutional convention thought that the country could be re-founded. They were wrong,” he said.

The defeated constitution called for, among other things, repositioning Chile as a “plurinational” state, in which indigenous people, who make up about 12% of the population, would have near total autonomy and their own judicial systems in their territories. It also called for the abolition of the Senate and a greater role for the state in the economy.

Ironically, most of the largest Mapuche indigenous communities voted massively to reject the constitutional text, in many cases by more than 70% of the vote. Indigenous people wanted to be treated equally, not to be isolated from the rest of the country.

It’s too early to tell whether the plebiscite in Chile will have a big impact in other Latin American countries, but it could. It may a cautionary tale for Latin America’s radical left, which has been gaining ground in recent years as economic conditions in the region deteriorated.

“The left in Chile didn’t understand that this is a moderate country, that doesn’t want violence, that doesn’t want extreme situations,” former Chilean President Eduardo Frei, a centrist who supported the “No” vote, told me. “This is also a lesson that could apply to the rest of Latin America.”

Roberto Ampuero, a former Chilean foreign minister, agrees. “This sends a message of hope to moderate sectors in Latin America. It shows that it can succeed challenging radical leftist populist offensives and win in the polls,” Ampuero told me.

Some may argue that Chile, a country of only 19 million people, is too small to influence its much bigger neighbors. But Chile has often been a political trendsetter in the region.

It drew world attention when its self-described Marxist president Salvador Allende won a democratic election in 1970. Then, Chile became an international symbol of the region’s ruthless right-wing military dictatorships of the 1970s when Gen. Augusto Pinochet staged a coup in 1973. And for 30 years, since the return of democracy in 1990, Chile became a regional model of economic growth, free trade and democratic elections.

The Sept. 4 plebiscite may be a great opportunity for Chile to show the way once again. It showed that while Chileans rightly demand a more inclusive economic growth, they don’t want to erase some of the good policies of the past three decades.

Chile’s pro-investment economic policies, carried out by both left-of-center and right-of-center governments since 1990, were immensely more effective in reducing poverty than the free-spending populist recipes of Venezuela or Argentina.

Chile’s gross domestic product grew tenfold between 1990 and 2020, and — more important — poverty fell from 36% of the population in 2000 to 10% in 2020, according to World Bank figures.

And Chile did this in a democracy, without strongmen, without massive violence or forcing millions into exile. Meantime, Venezuela went from being one of the region’s richest countries to one of the poorest over the same period.

Now, most Chileans rightly recognize that their economic system needs some fine-tuning to help those who haven’t benefited enough from the country’s growth. The good news is that, following the Sept. 4 plebiscite, they may make their system more equitable without threatening to destroy what worked. There is a chance that Chile, once again, may become a model of economic development for the rest of the region.

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