Two years ago, when Chile began the process of drawing up a new 21st-century constitution to replace its dictatorship-era charter, proponents hoped it would usher in a new era of togetherness.

But as the country prepares to vote on Sunday on whether to adopt the proposed social contract, a sharp economic downturn coupled with a wave of disinformation, disillusionment and sometimes violent street campaigns have cast a pall over the process that every poll indicates will be rejected.

“In the beginning, there was big support for change but the new text is not encouraging people to come out in support,” said José Antonio Cousiño, 75, a former civil servant who lived through the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. He said he would vote against the new constitution, saying it was “utopian” and tilted too far to the left.

Sunday’s plebiscite, the first mandatory election in Chile for a decade, will decide the fate of the proposed 388-article constitution that puts environmental and indigenous rights at its centre and places wide-ranging responsibilities on the state.

Many Chileans view the current charter as illegitimate because it was drawn up during the military dictatorship that ended in 1990, although it has been heavily amended since.

The idea of a new Chilean constitution was born from a wave of public anger that boiled over in 2019 in mass demonstrations over rising inequality and the parlous state of public services. A 154-member assembly was elected in a vote the following year to draft the new text.

However, the constitutional assembly, chosen on a low turnout of 43 per cent, has been criticised for not being representative. It is dominated by the left and many of those who stood as independents turned out to be radical activists. Congress is evenly split between left and right.

Sunday’s vote comes amid record inflation and a sharp slowdown in a country that has long prided itself on having Latin America’s most stable economy. Bankers predict that Chile will enter a technical recession in the second half of 2022.

Marta Lagos, a pollster, said many Chileans felt their country had hit “rock bottom”, and that extreme acts during the campaign — which included public nudity, what some saw as denigrations of the national flag and an incident when a cart was charged into a group of cyclists — served to further dampen the public mood.

Robert Funk, a political scientist, said that while the 2019 protests centred around social policy and demands for equality, the constitutional rewrite has focused instead on identity aspects, regionalism and the environment. “People are now reacting to that . . . for a lot of Chileans it feels like certain groups have been given priority treatment,” he said.

The latest opinion polls suggest the number of people set to reject the new text has widened. A total of 57 per cent said they were against, versus 43 per cent in favour, according to Pulso Ciudadano, although analysts warned that the fact the referendum was mandatory made surveys less reliable.

Lagos, the pollster, said the distance between the two camps “could only narrow if there was a high turnout”, although she was sceptical about the effectiveness of fines for those who did not participate. About 15mn people are eligible to vote.

Natalie Barria, 29, a social worker who plans to vote in favour, said there was “a lot of mistrust,” over which outcome was best for Chileans. Even those most likely to benefit from the protections that a new constitution would offer were “fearful that it isn’t the right choice”, she said.

The new constitution broadly shifts power to the state when it comes to the provision of services and grants far-reaching environmental and social rights across education, health and housing.

It defines Chile as a “plurinational, intercultural, regional and ecological” state and offers constitutional recognition to indigenous peoples, who make up about 13 per cent of the Chilean population.

But its promise of autonomous territories with their own justice systems has alarmed many citizens, including some from within the indigenous community, who fear legal injustice and a threat to national unity.

The document has also scared business and foreign investors, who warned its sweeping provisions and vague drafting would undermine property rights in the mining-dependent economy and lead to years of legal challenges.

Gabriel Boric, Chile’s 36-year-old president whose leftwing coalition has championed the reform process, has called for unity. “Regardless of the result, we must not lose sight that we’ll continue building a country for everyone,” he said this week. “We must make the effort to learn from our adversaries.” 

Boric, who was among the signatories to the constitutional convention process, stands to lose politically if the text is rejected. Some analysts say his increasingly unpopular government may struggle to manage public expectations after the vote, amid fears of a return to street violence. Boric’s approval rating at present stands at 38 per cent.

The president has said he would propose a fresh constituent convention process if the charter was rejected, although Claudia Heiss, a professor of government at the University of Chile, said there were no guarantees he could do this.

“Legally, if rejected, the only outcome is that the current constitution stays,” Heiss said, adding a rejection would also reinvigorate the country’s rightwing opposition.

Funk said that, whatever the outcome on Sunday, there was still a broad consensus that a new Chilean constitution was needed.

“Who will draft it, which text they’ll work from and how long this will take” were all questions that needed to be clarified, Funk said. What was certain, he added, was that “there is no more room for political experiments”.