On 25 October, Chile will hold a referendum that will decide whether the country will draft a new political constitution. A new constitution that enjoys popular legitimacy promises to fix a profound political crisis that led to five months of protests in late 2019 and early 2020, and has severely aggravated the country’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, we argue, the success of this constitutional process will depend on its ability to widely represent citizens.
Protests and unmet demands
The protests that started in October 2019 were unprecedented because they had huge youth engagement (55% of people aged 18-24 participated in at least one protest), were leaderless, cut-across classes and ideologies, and involved unseen levels of violence. Centred on the rejection of the “abuse” of the elite and the state, multiple demands coalesced in these mobilizations. Many protestors came from a large, diverse group of organizations with longstanding demands and involvement in demonstrations that can be traced back to the early 2000s. While their demands point to issues in health, education, housing, jobs, and pensions, they all unveil an ineffective social protection system co-opted by economic interests.
Since Pinochet’s dictatorship in the 1980s, the Chilean state has, for example, insistently weakened its public schools to benefit the private sector. In fact, 60% of pupils currently attend some sort of private school, which means that the majority of students pay tuition to institutions in order to obtain education.
