3 questions to understand how the new Constitution of Chile will be written after the overwhelming rejection in the previous process

“Once again, despite the difficulties, we have decided to solve the problems of democracy with more democracy and not with less.”

This is how the Chilean president assessed gabriel boric the new agreement that Congress reached this Monday to resume the process of drafting a new Constitution.

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The agreed new rules are the result of almost 100 days of negotiations that began after the plebiscite of September 4, 2022, when the citizenry rejected by 62% a first constitutional proposal elaborated by a Convention.

The day after the triumph of the rejection, Boric summoned the presidents of the Senate and the Chamber to “agree as soon as possible on the deadlines and borders of a new constitutional process.”

Faced with other legislative urgency and citizen concerns such as security, and responding to the demands of the opposition parties, the government began to cede prominence to Congress, where an agreement endorsed by 14 political parties with parliamentary representation was reached.

According to the signed document, the new constitutional proposal will be drawn up by a Constituent Council made up of 50 members of popular election. The Council will work together with an Expert Commission appointed by Congress. The approved standards will also be reviewed by a Technical Council elected by the Senate and made up of 14 jurists.

To restart the process under these new rules, and to be able to submit the new proposal to a referendum in November 2023, Congress must approve a new constitutional reform project with immediate discussion by the Executive.

BBC Mundo presents the content of the agreement, the differences it marks with the previous constituent process and the reactions generated by the document.

1. What was agreed?

“Discussing and writing a Constitution today is important and essential and requires a level of professionalism, having experts; likewise, it must be done by a body other than Congress, with exclusive dedication.”

That is one of the first paragraphs of the so-called “Agreement for Chile.”

The electoral rejection of the proposal elaborated by the Constitutional Convention forced to look for other ways to change the Magna Carta of Chile. (GETTY IMAGES).

According to the document, the drafting of the Constitution will begin with the preparation of a draft by an Expert Commission that will be installed in January 2023.

This Expert Commission will be made up of 24 people with “indisputable professional, technical and/or academic trajectories”, elected equally by the lower house and the senate. Its members will be selected according to the representation of the political forces in Congress and will be approved by four sevenths of the votes of each chamber.

Once in office, the Commission will make its decisions by a quorum of three fifths and must deliver its proposal to the Constitutional Council, which it will join with the right to speak, but not to vote.

Meanwhile, the Constitutional Council will be elected by universal and compulsory vote in April 2023 and will have 50 members, maintaining the criteria of parity between men and women and the presence of indigenous seats.

Once its work has begun, in May 2023, the Council may approve, reject or modify the proposal of the Expert Commission, and discuss and approve the norms and the final text of the new Constitution by three fifths of its votes.

Both the Expert Commission and the Convention will follow the gender parity criteria.

Finally, both the norms approved by both the Expert Commission and the Constitutional Council will be reviewed by a Technical Admissibility Committee, made up of 14 people elected by Congress and approved by four sevenths in both chambers.

According to the proposed itinerary, the new draft Constitution will be delivered on October 21, 2023 and will be submitted to a ratification plebiscite with a mandatory vote on November 26, 2023.

2. How is it different from the previous process?

The new agreement seals a marked difference with the previous constitutional process.

One of the symbols of the distance between the previous process and the new proposal is that no member of the dissolved Constitutional Convention may participate in the Expert Commission or the Constitutional Council now proposed.

Those who participated in the previous Constitutional Convention will not be able to participate in the drafting of the new Constitution. (GETTY IMAGES).

The agreement replaces the term Constitutional Convention with that of the Constitutional Council, reduces the number of members from 155 to 50, and although it maintains a 100 percent elected body to draft the new Constitution, it is accompanied by an Expert Commission defined in Congress, and a Technical Committee that also arises from Parliament.

In general, under the new rules, Congress will have greater power in the development of the constitutional process. Parliament will have an exclusive role in the selection of two of the three instances of the process: the Expert Commission and the Technical Admissibility Committee, which will work together with the 100% elected Constituent Council.

The new agreement will also give greater power to political parties in the constituent process. The first Convention was elected with a mechanism that favored the election of independent candidacies. This time, the vote will be carried out according to the electoral system that applies to the Senate, with open lists made up of parties or party pacts. Although the lists may include independent people, this increases the power of the communities within the election of the Council.

Regarding the indigenous seats -which totaled 17 in the previous Convention- this time those seats in the Constitutional Council will be assigned according to the percentage of effective voting carried out through the indigenous seats ballot.

The new Constitution proposal will not be drawn up from a “blank sheet”, but from 12 constitutional bases pre-agreed by the parties and incorporated into the agreement, in which Chile is defined as a “Social and Democratic State of Law “, the flag, the coat of arms and the national anthem are recognized as national emblems and a bicameral legislative power is enshrined, made up of a Senate and a Chamber of Deputies.

3. Who supports the agreement and who rejects it?

The agreement is supported by a broad spectrum of parties that includes left and center-left forces today in the government, members of the former Concertación (including the Socialist, Radical, and Christian Democrat Parties) and right-wing and center-right groups today in the opposition.

The president of Chile, Gabriel Boric, announced the agreement to elaborate the new Constitution. (Reuters).

Within the formations with parliamentary representation, the Republican Party, at the extreme right of the political spectrum, left the agreement, arguing that the country does not need a new Constitution.

The People’s Party, self-defined as a group “without political ideologies”, which criticized the negotiation as “political cooking”, also marginalized from the agreement.

One of the main topics of discussion in the days prior to the signing of the agreement was how to form the constituent body. The government parties bid for a body one hundred percent elected by the citizenry, while the opposition forces promoted a mixed Convention, with expert voices appointed by Congress.

“An imperfect agreement is preferable to not having an agreement,” said President Boric in the final days of the negotiation, where it was decided to include both options: an elected Constitutional Council with the right to speak and vote, and an Expert Commission elected and defined in Congress that will draft a draft and will only have the right to speak in the process .

Deputy Javier Macaya, who persevered in the negotiations even in the face of threats from radicalized sectors, assured that the agreement “is not a victory in and of itself, but the restart of a constituent path.”

The parliamentarian stated that the pre-approved constitutional bases and the development of a preliminary project designed by the Expert Commission will avoid “refounding experiments.”

In the Communist Party, another of the signatories of the agreement, the former presidential candidate and mayor Daniel Jadue used social networks to ensure that In the agreement, “the ghosts of supervised democracy persist”but added that the PC would join the process “to dispute space for those who continue to believe they are the owners of Chile.”

“We had an expectation of a 100% elected body… but we need 4/7 in Congress, we need the votes of the right,” said Deputy Diego Ibáñez, leader of the pro-government Frente Amplio in statements to Radio Cooperativa.

“We know that this is going to be a Constitution that is not going to leave everyone happy,” added Ibáñez, “but it is going to establish a minimum floor, a democratic social State of law that is going to serve to enable social transformations and that in this it will unite us in a new social pact”.

Source: Elcomercio