You'd think they've have learned from our experience....
The Chilean Government as announced that in April there will be a referendum;
Question 1) Do you want a new constitution?
If the vote is yes, then in October will be a second referendum;
Question 2) Who do you want to write that constitution?
- a) 50 Politicians 50 non-politicians
- b) 100 non politicians
Draft constitution will then be delivered October 2021
This has removed a substantial portion of what was being cited as the protesters motivation and the justification of their actions.
Needless to say, their current constitution isn't very good, but has no bearing on their current problems whatsoever.
What is difficult to know is how many people are supporting / will support this...
There were about 750,000 in the big demonstration at Plaza Italia the other week. (Despite claims of 2 million, a man I know who has a military satellite says that there were 750k)
Most people would have turned up for that, so Santiago support is probably only a little bit bigger than that. Let's say a total of 850,000 dedicated supporters in Santiago? And let's double it for the whole country = 1.7m?
So 10% of the population, 12% of the electorate.
Then let's assume there's half as much again that are sympathetic but not active - 15% of the pop, 18% of the electorate, 2.5m people. And I should think that's best case.
24 months ago there was an election. An awful turn out (40% ish), but Pinera was elected with 3.5m votes which was around 54% of the total votes cast. It was only the second presidential election where voting was not compulsory.
4m people voted for Pinera in the last election, 28% of the electorate, and theoretically at least those people support the status quo..
Now I know that those figures are overly simplistic and likely flawed in many ways, but really, how does anybody see this achieving anything meaningful?
A better job of kicking the can down the corridor without conceding anything that matters you will never see . Clearly there is a genius in Government.
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