[Politics] Is the current Constitution legitimate?

[FNX Magokiler]

This question was asked again and again by journalist Mónica Rincón, in a television program on the night of the December 17 plebiscite, to Bárbara Figueroa, general secretary of the PC, in the face of the latter's obvious discomfort and evasiveness. A few days later, in a seminar held on December 21, former president Michelle Bachelet stated that it is a “mistake” to think that the result of the plebiscite means the consolidation of the 1980 Constitution.

Is the current Constitution legitimate? The common doctrine of the opposition to the Pinochet dictatorship, at the request of the Group of 24, was that the 1980 Constitution was “illegitimate in its origin, and undemocratic in its content.” That was our common position under the dictatorship.

The decision to attend the plebiscite of October 5, 1988 conferred, at least implicitly, a certain letter of legitimacy to that Fundamental Charter. That decision to participate, and the triumph of the NO option at the polls, was at the base of the peaceful transition to democracy, with the consequent defeat of Pinochet's continuity around the YES option, and the policy of rebellion. mass popular movement promoted by the PC.

The approval by more than 90% of the electorate in the July 1989 plebiscite of 54 constitutional reforms submitted to citizen consultation conferred formal legitimacy on the 1980 Constitution. This would be the constitutional framework by which the democratic transition would be governed. Those were the rules of the game agreed upon by the citizens.

 

 

All elections, all acts of the different governments, including the current one, and of the State as a whole, have submitted their actions to the Constitution, including the possibility of its reform by the quorum established in it.

However, the issue of the “authoritarian enclaves” of the 1980 Constitution remained, which hindered the full exercise of popular sovereignty. An important part of them was eliminated by virtue of the unanimous approval by parliament of the constitutional reform of 2005. This is how Supreme Decree No. 100, of September 22, 2005, established “the consolidated, coordinated and systematized text of the Political Constitution of the Republic of Chile”, signed by President Ricardo Lagos Escobar and his cabinet.

However, although it was a substantive advance, it did not completely clear up the issue of the legitimacy of the Fundamental Charter. If we are to take Fernando Atria's book, The Tramping Constitution (2013), as a background for the previous problem, we would have to conclude that almost all of the locks or traps mentioned by the once conventional constituent would have already been removed: the binominal electoral system , deleted January 30, 2015; the four-sevenths quorum of the Constitutional Organic Laws, eliminated in January 2023 and replaced by the vote of the majority of sitting parliamentarians, and the “meta lock” of 60 or 66% quorum to reform the Constitution, reduced to four-sevenths, also in 2022 thanks to the constitutional reform promoted by senators Ximena Rincón and Matías Walker.

 

https://www.elmostrador.cl/noticias/opinion/2024/01/06/es-legitima-la-actual-constitucion/