Chile’s political parties agree to start a new process to draft a draft Constitution

The political parties of Chili They announced an agreement on the roadmap that the new constituent process will follow at dawn this Tuesday after more than three months of intense negotiations.

“A new path has just begun to advance in a new Constitution Born in democracy, it is a new opportunity to forge a new future for our homeland and our people.” said the president of the Senate, Álvaro Elizalde, after signing the document in the library of the old Congress of Santiago.

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The President of the Chamber of Deputies and Deputies, Vlado Mirosevic added, for his part, that “we have taken all the precautions to avoid making the mistakes of the past and for this process to work well.”

The pact establishes that the new drafting body, which will be called the Constitutional Council, will be made up of 50 people elected by the citizens and that the process will also have the binding participation of 24 designated experts (12 by the Chamber of Deputies and 12 by the Senate in parity) who will accompany the tour.

“The proposed constitutional norms will be approved by 3/5 of the acting directors, submitting the final proposal to the Council for approval by the same quorum,” the document says.

The experts, “of indisputable professional, technical and/or academic trajectory”, will prepare a preliminary draft from January that will be the basis of work for the drafting body, “in the style of a matrix idea”, as established in the pact.

When the drafting body, which will be equal and will have indigenous seats, although it is not yet known how many, has the proposal for a new Constitution ready, it will return it to the experts that they will initiate a harmonization process and may review substantive aspects, if they consider it so.

The last step will be the exit plebiscite, with a mandatory vote, which is projected for November 23, 2023.

The agreement also contemplates 12 bases of the new fundamental text which include the mention of Chile as a unitary State, the social and democratic State of law, the recognition of indigenous peoples and maintaining autonomous bodies such as the Central Bank, among others.

As it is a norm that reforms the current Constitution, the agreement will have to be voted on in the form of a bill in Congress and be ratified by 4/7 of the parliamentarians. Today the far-right Republican Party and the People’s Party, aligned with the populist right, were excluded from the signing of the agreement.

The pact comes after more than three months of intense negotiations between the political forces in which the design of the mechanism to choose the drafting body of the text has been the main stumbling block. With the progress of the negotiations, both parties have been approaching positions until reaching today’s pact.

The Chilean constituent process crystallized after the massive wave of protests that shook the country at the end of 2019, the largest since the end of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).

The parties gave way to a Constitutional Convention that operated for a year to change the fundamental law inherited from the dictatorship and partially reformed into democracy.

The final proposal was rejected in a referendum on September 4, and opened a new path that was announced tonight.

Source: Elcomercio

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