Gabriel Boric ensures the autonomy of the Convention that drafts the new Constitution in Chile

The president-elect of Chile, the 35-year-old leftist Gabriel Boric, on Tuesday paid a visit to the Convention that drafts the new Constitution of the country and affirmed that it will not try to tell the body what it has to do and will respect what it decides.

“I am not going to try to guide the Convention with what it has to do, but to respect and implement what is deliberately decided here”, Indian Boric after meeting with the Presidency of the body Elisa Loncon.

“This is a long-term State issue. We all have to do our best, regardless of our political differences, for this process to be successful, because if the Convention goes well, Chile will do well ”, added.

The drafting of a new Magna Carta – which will have to be approved in a mandatory voting plebiscite – was finalized on November 15, 2019, in an agreement between the political forces – from which only the Communist Party was excluded – as an institutional solution. to the protests that began on October 18, some very violent, in which 34 people died. The agreement was signed by Boric, which earned him criticism from the Broad Front and the PC.

The Convention began to function on July 4 and is made up of 155 members, elected on a parity basis and with the inclusion of 17 indigenous seats. He has nine months – extendable only once for another three – to draft the new Constitution.

“We have ratified our full will to collaborate with the constitutional process and with the Convention”, assured the president-elect after meeting with the president of the entity, the Mapuche academic Elisa Loncon, and the vice president, lawyer and professor of constitutional law Jaime Bassa.

From the body, Bassa affirmed that he hopes that the next government will have a “less worked” relationship with the Convention than the one that the current Executive of the conservative Sebastián Piñera has had until now.

“We know that the country expects collaboration and solidarity, fraternal and Sororo work. It has cost us a lot to work this collaboration with the outgoing government, “said Bassa.

Boric beat the 55-year-old right-wing lawyer José Antonio Kast (44.1%) in Sunday’s elections, with 55.8% of the votes.

The new Constitution will replace the current one, inherited from the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) and criticized by citizens as the origin of the inequalities in Chile that led to the 2019 protests.

__________________________________