Chilean President urges new Constitution to be drafted by elected body

The President of Chile, Gabriel Boric, asserted Thursday that an elected body should draft the country’s future Constitution amid negotiations on the mechanism to present a new Magna Carta after the rejection in a plebiscite in September of the proposal prepared by the Constitutional Convention.

“I have pointed out that I think it is very important, to safeguard in the future the full legitimacy and transversality of the future Constitution, that an elected body be the one to draft it. This can have all the collaboration of experts that may be established, and that may be necessary”, the Chilean president affirmed to the local press.

Boric remarked, “it is in everyone’s desire that we have a new Constitution, a new social pact”.

Chilean political parties have been negotiating for almost three months to define the mechanism for drafting the country’s new Magna Carta.

The Chilean ruling party is leaning towards a 100 percent elected body, while the opposition has advocated for an institution composed of elected members and experts appointed by the political parties.

However, all blocs agree that it will not be carried out as in the last process, with a Constitutional Convention composed of 155 elected members, with a parity mechanism, quotas reserved for native peoples, and laxity to register independent candidacies.

Last September 4, Chileans rejected the draft of the new Constitution drafted over the course of a year by the Constitutional Convention.

Chile, therefore, kept in force the Magna Carta of 1980, approved during the military government of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).

However, despite this rejection, the Andean country will continue with the constituent process to present a second proposal for a Constitutional Charter whose rules are currently being defined by the political parties.