Can Chile’s constitutional convention defuse people’s discontent?

THE PRESIDENTIAL election due in November will be like no other in Chile since the restoration of democracy in 1989. That is partly because the leading candidates are fairly new faces, and the Concertación, the centre-left alliance that dominated most of that period, is no more. But it is mainly because the winner will at first cohabit with a convention which is writing a new constitution and which could decide to curtail the normal four-year presidential term. All this is because Chile is still picking up the pieces after an explosion of massive and sometimes violent protests in late 2019 that shook what had been one of Latin America’s most stable and seemingly successful countries.