Last Sunday, Chile voted to overwhelmingly reject the draft for a new Constitution that would have replaced the current document written in 1980 during Pinochet’s dictatorship. For weeks, polls were predicting a win for Rechazo (Reject), but it still came as a great surprise when Apruebo (Approve) obtained only 38.41 percent of the votes against 61.86 percent for reject. This was a difference of over 20 points, which contrasted strongly with the results of the 2020 referendum, in which 78.8 percent voted for the writing of a new Constitution and only 21.72 percent opposed it. Since the proposal voted on on Sunday contained a series of progressive ideas popularised during and after the uprising of 2019, there was some expectation that the results would be more or less aligned with Boric’s election results last December, in which he won with 55.87 percent of votes. So what went wrong?

Last Sunday’s referendum was the first mandatory vote in a decade, meaning that turnout was among the highest in Chilean history. 86 percent of the electorate took to the polls, achieving a level of participation similar to that of the 1988 referendum that initiated the country’s transition to democracy. This high level of electoral participation left both campaigns uncertain about how the normally politically abstinent section of the population would vote. As the count began on Sunday, it was clear that the tendency among new voters was toward Rechazo, quickly raising the notion of a ‘silent majority’ who do not commonly express their political positions by way of voting.

It would be simplistic to homogenise those millions of people who decided to vote for the first time. The high turnout speaks more to the limitations of voluntary voting systems than the kind of politics hiding behind these non-voters: voluntary votes, especially with the first referendum and Boric’s election, gave the impression of the rise of a new progressive politics with mass support. This was accompanied by considerable expressions of ‘street politics’ that occupied front pages over the last three years. For the first time in decades, Chile was openly discussing the inequalities, injustices, and oppression felt by the people, and it felt like left-wing politics and progressive ideas were predominant in Chile’s population. The slogan ‘neoliberalism was born in Chile and will die in Chile’ became a rallying cry for many social and political organisations. And while the rise of progressive politics in Chile cannot be ignored, Sunday’s results show that the circumstances are much more complex.

According to the recent data analysis published by Miguel Angel Fernandez and Eugenio Guzman from Universidad del Desarrollo, Rechazo won in each of the sixteen regions and 338 of the 346 communes, leaving Apruebo winning only in eight communes. This data also identifies that those in low and medium-low income preferred Rechazo by 87.4 percent and 87.6 percent respectively, with slightly larger support than found in medium-high and high-income areas. Similarly, Rechazo won in rural areas and places with a high density of indigenous people. The lean toward rejecting the constitutional draft across all social groups and demographics cannot simply be explained simply by way of the Rechazo campaign’s excessive use of disinformation, as some are already trying to do by referring to the referendum as the ‘Chilean Brexit’. Such forces played a role, but it is important to look more closely at the reasons that led to this result and the possible explanations for the defeat of the Apruebo campaign.

A survey of 1135 people carried out by CADEM—one of Chile’s main market research companies—on found that 40 percent decided to reject the draft because the ‘process led by the Convention was poor’. 35 percent believed that the draft would ‘create instability and uncertainty’, 29 percent rejected the proposal of ‘plurinationality and indigenous autonomy’, and 24 percent said that ‘it was not necessary to write a new constitution, it [the current one] just needs reforming’. Only seven percent explained their rejection of the draft due to it permitting ‘free abortion’, seven percent because the new constitution would ‘eliminate the Senate and concentrate the power in the Deputies camera’, and just one percent because ‘it gives the state control of natural resources’.

CIPER, a research centre, also published a report based on 120 testimonies from people who voted for Rechazo from across 12 working-class communes in Santiago. Although this study has clear methodological limitations, the report concludes that the main reasons people voted Rechazo was the possibility of ‘losing their houses’ and seeing their inheritance ‘expropriated by the state’. The second most offered reason was, again, the proposal for plurinationality, which would ‘divide the country’ and create ‘differentiated juridical systems’, while the third was that ‘pension funds would be expropriated by the state and not inherited by family members’. None of these presumptions are true, but this gives an impression of the difficulties faced by the Apruebo campaign both in messaging and in connecting people’s material concerns with the articles proposed in the draft.

In both studies, plurinationality was one of the main factors given for voting Rechazo. The constitutional draft proposed that Chile would be a plurinational state that would recognise the existence of different pueblos and indigenous nations inhabiting the country. The concept of plurinationality was contained in a series of articles that recognised indigenous territories, their autonomy, and—more controversially—allowed for the creation of an indigenous justice system and implementation of juridical pluralism. This juridical reform would allow indigenous people to have a justice system parallel to the national one where they could deal with communal issues by way of their own cultural and juridical customs, while being still subject to national law and the rule of the Supreme Court. Whilst the proposal for plurinationality was one of the most progressive points of the draft and represented significant reparations for indigenous groups in Chile, it became a hotly contested aspect because of both the misinterpretation of the proposal and the struggle of progressive forces to popularise the importance of such historical demands.

The Rechazo campaign and mainstream media focused doggedly on the issue of plurinationality, repeating without explanation that the country would be divided into many countries and a minority of indigenous people would be above the law that applies to everyone else. Often with a distinct racist tone, media and politicians from the Rechazo campaign used the contested element of plurinationality to pursue the narrative that the Constitutional Convention only drafted the Constitution for some groups—primarily ‘the left’ and ‘the minorities’—at the expense of the ‘large majorities’ who would be subject to a justice system that would not benefit them. The focus on this point made a deep impression among working-class communities, who themselves have little or no access to forms of justice and have instead been demanding improved access to justice itself rather than wholesale reform to its structure.

Plurinationality, then, became an inaccessible idea or an empty signifier that only ‘the left’ was demanding, one not even supported by ‘all indigenous groups’, as the Rechazo campaign was keen to emphasise. The alienation of plurinationality from other, more popular social demands, such as the national health system, free education, and a new pension system, was essential for the Rechazo campaign to win. For this reason, we must not suggest that the 62 percent who voted for Rechazo are ignorant nationalists or racists. Instead, the rejection of plurinationality reflects the inability of progressive forces to convey the important relationship between broader inequalities and the oppression of indigenous groups and the failure to connect the demands of October 2019 with the proposals contained in the idea of plurinationality.

There are those, of course, who say that the Apruebo campaign had lost before it even started in July. The Rechazo campaign unofficially began with the confirmation of the Constitutional Convention in June 2021, allowing right-wing parties and the media to contest every proposal and discussion it held, as well as allowing them to publicly delegitimise the behaviour of its members, most of whom were never before part of public institutions and were not used to such intense public scrutiny. Isolated events, such as the resignation of one of the Convention’s members after it was revealed that they were faking cancer, became predominant in the public narrative, creating a sense that the Convention was just as untrustworthy and corrupt as other political institutions. This is shown by the CADEM study, in which 40 percent of respondents indicated that they voted to reject the draft because of the poor procedures led by the Convention.

If we look at it in this way, the inequalities between the campaigns were not only financial, but also existed in terms of time dedicated to them and the predominance of their respective narratives in the mind of the public. Rechazo had a year head-start in which to organise themselves and prepare a systematic campaign against the proposal, while the Apruebo campaign could only communicate the draft when it was finished and the Convention had closed at the end of June. This is, perhaps, something progressive forces could not have avoided nor prevented, but does suggest that that the result on Sunday was a vote of discontent based on similar principles to those that triggered the social uprising of 2019—namely, the perceived incapacity of political institutions to respond to the demands of the people.

So, what is left after this defeat for Apruebo? It is uncertain what the process for a new Constitution will now look like. President Boric has already met the presidents of both legislative chambers and with the main political parties to begin to define the terms for writing a new draft. Right-wing parties will try to prevent the creation of a new Convention and even the writing of a new Constitution altogether. Political forces on the right and centre will block attempts to repeat the incorporation of an indigenous quota and gender parity in any future Convention, and some will try to prevent the possibility of another referendum to vote on the new draft.

The defeat of Apruebo not only has a significant impact on how progressive ideas will get through to a new Constitution, but represents a challenge for democratic forces in a new process. The victory of Rechazo will be mobilised to transfer power back to political elites, disenfranchising the same mass of people who voted to reject the draft last Sunday. Nevertheless, polls show that a new Constitution is still highly popular, and it will be the role of progressive forces to continue to ensure some elements such as the right to water, a national health system, reproductive rights, and free education can still be included in any future draft. These remain basic things Chileans do not have and desperately need. Some groups on the left will return to the streets to revive the spirit and action of October 2019, while others will take this defeat as a terminal point in their efforts. Whatever comes next, it is still the responsibility of progressive forces to continue building toward the end of neoliberalism in Chile, and to speak to that ‘silent majority’ that loudly expressed itself last Sunday.