The total debacle of the ruling party was consummated in the popular communes of Greater Santiago, where the Approval expected a victory that did not come. Against all odds, in them the Rejection also achieved convincing figures. CIPER went through 12 of those communes and, without pretending to make a statistical measurement, collected the arguments of its residents who voted Rejection. That the State would appropriate the houses, that the pension funds would not be inheritable, that the country would be divided, a vote to punish the government and reject abortion, was what was repeated the most. See all 120 responses here.
When the first polls were opened in Magallanes on the afternoon of Sunday, September 4, and a clear tendency began to be noticed against the proposal of the Constitutional Convention, the Approve command pinned its hopes on the results of Santiago and Valparaíso. There they still said that, if in those regions their option exceeded 57% of the votes, they had a chance of winning the election. Until that moment, everything pointed to the Rejection winning comfortably in the regions, so the hopes of the ruling party were pinned on the victory that, according to forecasts, it could obtain in the popular communes of the capital. The unknown was how much he would win in those sectors and if that margin would be enough to neutralize the advantage of the Rejection in the rest of the country. But that didn’t happen.
The biggest surprise of the plebiscite was the wide victory of the Rejection in the Metropolitan Region and in Valparaíso (55.2% and 57.6%, respectively), which finally consolidated a total disaster for the Approval. What happened that the prediction of the electoral experts in those sectors was not fulfilled?
Without any scientific claim or desire to obtain significant results from a statistical point of view, CIPER collected testimonies in 12 popular districts of Greater Santiago. We asked 120 people why they had voted Reject last Sunday. The results of that query are obviously not representative, but it is an interesting exercise to review the responses that were repeated.
The testimonies were collected in the following 12 districts: Renca, San Bernardo, Independencia, El Bosque, Cerrillos, La Cisterna, La Pintana, Quilicura, Recoleta, Puente Alto, Estación Central and Maipú (check here the complete list of answers).
THE HOUSES WILL BE OF THE STATE
The 120 people interviewed by CIPER gave, in general, more than one reason to lean towards Rejection. These responses were grouped together and the result showed that the argument that was reiterated the most (29 times) was concern about home ownership: people stated that they had marked Rejection because their houses would become state property or would not be inheritable.
These answers reflect that misinformation, interpretations that deviated from what was written in the constitutional proposal and, directly, false news, could have played a relevant role in the vote. The proposal for the new Constitution did not contemplate that the State appropriate the houses, nor that these could not be inherited by the children.
In second place on the list, with 21 mentions, appeared the plurinationality or that the new Constitution “was going to divide the country”. Another 20 people indicated that their reason for voting Rejection was that the pension funds were not going to be inheritable or that the State was going to expropriate them. That wasn’t true either. The proposal of the Convention left in the hands of the parliamentarians, who would discuss the law that would establish the Social Security System, the definitions on the ownership of the funds.
The fourth reason that was mentioned as a reason for rejecting (20 cases) was that they did not like the government or President Gabriel Boric. “Disappointed with Boric”, “the president did not comply”, “the government has not done anything”, were some of the reasons given at this point.
The payroll continues with criticism of the behavior of the conventional (15 mentions); because it consecrated abortion (13 mentions) and because it guaranteed rights related to sexual diversity (8 mentions).
THE COMMUNES, THE ARGUMENTS
A study by the Faculty of Government of the Universidad del Desarrollo (Results of the 2022 plebiscite, community analysis on the decision to vote and participation), estimated that the lowest quintiles in the country favored the Rejection vote. According to this measurement, the quintile with the lowest income was inclined by 75.1% for Rejection, while in the communes of the quintile with the highest income, Approval obtained a figure higher than its national average: 39.5%.
Read in the following articles the 10 testimonies collected by CIPER in each of the 12 communes:
- Cerrillos: “Nowhere does it say that housing has to be guaranteed, own”
- Central Station: “Because everyone is going to be from Fonasa”
- El Bosque: “Once the person died, their assets were not inheritable nor their AFP funds”
- Independence: “I don’t understand politics, but since the Boric was for the I approve, I wanted to vote for the Rejection”
- La Cisterna: “It will always favor those above, no more, and we always stay where we are”
- La Pintana: “I didn’t like the education they were providing, municipal education for all”
- Maipú: “I think that all the people who had an inheritance did it for the same reason”
- Puente Alto: “It did not benefit us, the people, the people who work, it was for them no more, the politicians of the three communes”
- Renca: “People got bored with the populism of the President, who promised and he promised, and in the end he did nothing”
- Recoleta: “I am not well informed and in view of that I preferred Rejection”
- Quilicura: “I am supporting the President. However, for my topic Christian could not vote I approve”
- San Bernardo: “Although they wanted to remove the Constitution of 80, they did not understand that they introduce the subject of the native peoples”
Among the 120 testimonies collected by CIPER in these 12 communes of the Metropolitan Region, reasons appeared to reject the proposal of the Constitutional Convention that were not even in the catalog of what was denounced as false news and interpretations that deviated from the text. In Independencia, for example, Rodrigo understood that plurinationality meant that in Chile there would be several presidents: “I understood that they were going to have as governors, as each one was going to have their President, their leader, and they were going to be as independent, as alien to the country”. In Quilicura, Nora pointed out that one of the reasons she had for voting Rejection was that the new Constitution was going to unify all prices.
At Central Station, a resident refused because the children’s lives could be at risk: “From what I heard, I saw on the news, that they said that now any woman who becomes pregnant has the right to have an abortion, or to kill a child that I’m already a year old. And if the mom doesn’t want it, she has the right to kill him, and it’s not her fault.”
Another voter, in Maipú, voted Rejection because he believed that President Boric would serve a six-year term and could be re-elected for another six years: “No, if I don’t listen to anything, I read. Well, there was the part about President Boric, who could be six years and had to apply. And if he ran and stayed, again six more years as President, I don’t think so”.