Santiago: More than half of Chilean citizens did not support the draft of the country’s new constitution in Sunday’s referendum, the Chilean Electoral Service said after counting 99.33% of the ballots.
The latest data on the website of the Electoral Service showed that 55.76% of Chileans, or 6.86 million people, opposed the new version of the country’s constitution, while about 5.4 million expressed their support for the draft text.
Chilean leader Gabriel Borich said later that his government would not resume the constitutional process and would move on to other urgent reforms.
This was the second unsuccessful attempt to adopt a new text of the country’s constitution. In 2022, 61.9% of Chileans also voted against the new constitution.
Chile’s current constitution was adopted in 1980 during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and was later amended to remove undemocratic provisions.
In 2019, mass protests broke out in Chile, caused by the inability to obtain decent free education and healthcare services, low salaries, and rising tariffs.
As a result of the negotiations, the government and the protesters agreed to develop a new constitution.
