What happens next?

The fireworks and street celebrations are over in Chile, and now many months of hard work and uncertainty loom for a citizenry impatient for change.

Last Sunday’s overwhelming vote to have a constitutional convention with gender parity draft a new charter sets up a long schedule — the election of 155 citizens for that body on April 11 next year, the installation of the convention in the following month, and then a plebiscite on the proposed constitution in mid2022.

Yet the fact that Chileans voted to elect constituents who are not in Congress highlights an awkward dynamic: The constitutional project will unfold under the aegis of a government and Congress widely viewed as having failed their people.

“It has to be interpreted as a general and comprehensive rejection of the political class as a whole,” said Marcelo Mella, a political analyst at the Universidad de Santiago de Chile, a university in Chile’s capital.

The 155 people who will be elected to draft a new constitution are likely to revise or throw out a host of articles in the old one. There is concern that independent candidates will struggle to be elected to the constitutional convention because large political coalitions may try to dominate with their own candidates.

In addition, Chile’s indigenous groups are not specifically mentioned in the old constitution, and there is a push for indigenous candidates to be allowed to run in April for election to the constitutional convention.