Starting this Wednesday, Chile will enter its second attempt in two years to change the Constitution that has been in force since the dictatorship, this time with the radical right at the head of the council that will draft a new project to be submitted to a referendum.
The Constitutional Council is installed this Wednesday to review draft drafted by congressionally appointed experts. the text is a more moderate version from which emanated from the first attempt and which was rejected by 61% of the voters. The Constituent Assembly, then dominated by the left, proposed a radical change in the political, legislative and judicial system. Among others, it established the right to abortion and granted constitutional recognition to indigenous peoples.
Composed by 51 members, the new Constitutional Council has a large conservative majority. Twenty-three councilors are from the ultra-conservative Republican Party and 11 from traditional right-wing coalitions. The left monopolized 16 seats and an indigenous representative joined.
Gabriel Osorio Vargas, professor of constitutional law and member of that expert commission points out on the RFI antenna: “The important thing here was to establish the minimum that had to be in a constitutional text. A framework was established in which the different governments could feel protected by this constitutional framework and could develop their government program. In Chile we had an excessively programmatic constitution in which many times the ideas, for example, of the left were constrained by the constitutional text itself. Hopefully at least the constitutional council would not have a behavior similar to that of the previous convention that failed regarding the text that was proposed to the citizenship”.
He December 17 Chileans will have to pronounce on the new result. An eventual rejection would leave the rules as they are at a time when this country of almost 20 million inhabitants, with a wide gap between rich and poor, is more concerned about insecurity or the cost of living than for a change in rules, according to opinion studies. The left hopes that the new framework under discussion will incorporate few changes with respect to the current Constitution.
“I think there is a general idea that we must put an end to the Chilean constitutional problem and the only way is to establish a text that is representative and transversal and that it does not represent only one political sector,” underlines Osorio Vargas in RFI.
From the stubborn desire to change the Magna Carta, Chileans turned to disinterest. According to the Cadem survey, 58% have not been informed of the process and 48% would reject the proposal even without knowing it. Boric, whose term ends in 2026, has already anticipated that this will be his last effort to change the Constitution.
