Marcela Rios Tobar on the Failed Constitutional Process in Chile

Marcela Rios Tobar is the Director for Latin America and the Caribbean at International IDEA. From March 2022 until January 2023 she served as the Minister of Justice and Human Rights in Chile under Gabriel Boric.

Well, just to be fair, I think we need to take the initiation of the constitutional process back a little bit. Some people would argue that ever since the fraudulent approval of the 1980 constitution and a plebiscite during the dictatorship, there was stark opposition from everybody. But then, since the constitution itself made it so difficult to reform the constitution, political parties of the center left accepted the fact that it was not possible to replace the constitution. So, the current constitution has had over seventy reforms and it was accepted by the political elites that the constitution could be amended but not replaced.

The people who called for a replacement were really marginal sectors of political elites or academics or people on the left until 2011 when there was a broad social movement that arose among university students demanding a reform of the educational system. The students once again put the issue of constitutional replacement and constitutional transformation on the agenda because it was perceived that this sort of neoliberal form of structuring education was impossible to change without a new constitution. So, the students demanded this, even though it might have not been the central issue. But the constitutional replacement debate took force after 2011 and for two years until 2013, there was a lot of academic debate. You know, seminars, forums, also some discussions among the elites.

But then it did permeate the political system because the center-left candidates for the presidential election proposed a new constitution, including the winner of the election, President Bachelet. So, together with that there was a social movement that arose demanding not just a new constitution, but a new constitution through a constitutional assembly. It was called Marca Tu Voto, Mark Your Vote, and they called for people to mark their votes in the presidential election with an AC, which meant Constitutional Assembly in Spanish. It’s estimated about half a million people marked their votes on that occasion. And President Bachelet did set out a constitutional process that had participation. It was an innovation in terms of constitutional process.

But the actual text drafted by her government wasn’t sent to Congress until the last week before she left office and was never discussed because then a rightwing government assumed office that didn’t have a commitment to constitutional replacement. So when, as you say, the social revolt or protests arose in 2019, this precedent of a frozen new constitutional text produced through a participatory process was part of the political debate. I think it’s really hard to say how much of the constitutional demand was part of the protest. There is controversy among lawyers and social scientists and politicians in Chile. A lot of people thought that this was not necessarily a central demand among protesters. It was part of it. It was part of the protest that was probably more organized, more linked to social movements, to academics and so forth.

But it was the response of the political elites to the protest. It was the solution proposed by the political system as a way out of the political crisis and the social crisis. And it was, at that moment, a successful response in the sense that it was able to draw down the protests considerably. It didn’t eradicate the protests. Protests continued after the announcement of the constitutional process. But it was able to minimize the scope of the protests and in that sense, it was successful at the beginning.

There are three key themes that I’m hearing from you. The first is that there’s really been a longstanding demand to change the constitution because there’s a sense that it was tainted from the very beginning. The second is that beyond the sense of it being illegitimate, there were real structural issues within the constitution that prevented the government from making different types of reforms. So, there was a sense that we needed to be able to change some things. But then there’s a Third aspect that I want to touch on, which is how much the constitution had already changed over time. You mentioned it had seventy different amendments. In the United States, the constitution has existed for 200 years and only 27 amendments have actually been passed. So that’s significantly less than seventy within about thirty some odd years within Chile.

So, let’s start from the beginning here with the idea of the constitution itself being tainted because that is a difficult concept for people, particularly in a place like the United States to wrap their head around. Because in the United States, we put the constitution on a shrine. We think of it as something that is embraced by pretty much everybody across the political spectrum and is something that is revered. Within Chile, it seems like that could never happen because it was a constitution created under dictatorship. How does that feel? What is your relationship with the constitution when it was established and created and imposed upon the Chilean people rather than being something that was established through a more deliberative and democratic process?

Well, I think Justin, in this case, both the US and Chile are somewhat of outliers, are exceptions to a more generalized situation. In the case of the US because on average in the world, constitutions are changed, not just in Latin America or Africa, but also in Europe. You see constitutional debates. You see constitutional replacement. Constitutions are changed. In many newer constitutions, there are clauses and procedures, not just to amend, but also to replace the constitution. So, in that sense, the US is not necessarily the model. In the case of Chile, it’s also not common that a constitution drafted under a dictatorship without minimal democratic possibilities for the liberation is kept after a transition.

In that sense, the Chilean constitution had a legitimacy problem from the beginning. Mind you, that legitimacy problem was not necessarily a problem for all of the population. It was certainly a problem for the center-left political parties that ruled the country for most of the last 40 years. But as I had mentioned before, even public opinion polls had shown that for a lot of more everyday citizens the problem was not just a legitimacy problem. Mind you, they might see that as well. But increasingly, there was this notion that the constitution was kind of a straitjacket that didn’t allow the country to develop.

That notion was pushed in part by social movements of different sorts, not just to the movements that were very powerful, but also by the environmentalist movements that have grown throughout the country in several moments during the last two decades and that have increased preeminence on people’s preoccupations. The fact that, for instance, Chile is one of the few countries in the world where water rights are privatized. If you buy land, the water that is underneath the land is not necessarily yours, even though you bought the land, because water rights are sold separate from land – which is completely absurd. It’s also really detached from this idea under climate change that the access to water should be considered as a human right, as a basic human right.

So, there was a lot of questioning on what this really constrained role that the state had on social provision and other norms were allowing and that became an increasing problem. But regarding the reforms what was able to happen, because the constitution of 1980 was designed in a marvelous sort of Machiavellian way to protect itself. It had allowed the rightwing opposition to have overrepresentation. It had super majoritarian forums that inhibited reforms. A lot of the social provisions that in other countries might be part of legislation, for instance on health care or on housing, a lot of the things that are supposed to be matters of the legislator in regular democracies were enshrined in the constitution so that they couldn’t be changed.

So, the only things that could be changed were the things that had the agreement of both the right and the left and those were more marginal issues or more overt kind of really authoritarian dimensions. For instance, that the president couldn’t remove the generals leading the armed forces. But other things such as the electoral system, which enshrined this overrepresentation, wasn’t changed until 2015 when the center-left managed to have a majority of all houses. It was the first time that the center-left had a majority of all houses.

So, we have a constitution that for a lot of people was not legitimate but other people didn’t really mind the origin of it. Still, I think younger generations or more pragmatic citizens were really just wanting something that was able to allow the state and the country to tackle some of the more pressing issues that society perceived to be having.

So, you just mentioned how Chile’s constitution had made some substantial reforms, particularly under Bachelet. You mentioned during 2015 they finally made some significant reforms. I believe that was during the period that they introduced proportional representation and made the Chilean constitution a little bit more balanced in terms of the two political parties, the right and the left. This had been a long, ongoing process to be able to get to this point, but the Chilean constitution had become increasingly more democratic as time went on and Chile is considered highly democratic. I mean, I think it’s considered maybe the second most democratic country in all of Latin America. It’s got incredible democratic credentials at this point for how it’s governed and how the processes work in the country.

What were some of the issues that people felt they couldn’t really tackle because of the constitution? You’ve already mentioned water rights as one of them. What are some of the other issues that they thought really weren’t able to be solved unless if they changed the constitution and potentially even replace the constitution wholesale?

So, I think what the debate in Chile sort of came down to is, first, the role of the state. The state was really restricted. In every aspect of social provision, the constitution allowed for private enterprise to function first and the state to participate or intervene only when the private sector was not there or didn’t have the means. So, this idea of a subsidiary state was completely enshrined throughout the constitution in every aspect and Chile went really radical with pension, with education particularly, so the whole subsidiary role of the state in social provision, in environmental issues, on industrial policy, in economic policy, not just a small, but sort of for many what they perceive to be an inefficient or incapable state. That was a major source of demand for transformation.

The other was this idea of the mistrust of majorities, of popular majorities. The constitution was drafted by not just neoliberals on economics, but conservatives on values and on what they perceive to be a well-functioning democracy. So, the Chilean democracy was supposed to be protected from the people in many senses. That’s why you had all these designs in different parts of the constitution like the electoral system, the amount of super-majoritarian support that you require.

Then the constitutional tribunal which has ex ante powers to decide when the legislature is debating something and can say before it’s been legislated, before it has had any impact on anybody, this is not constitutional. It’s sort of a third chamber that distorts popular will, because if the majority of both houses win, for instance, on the right or on the left, the Constitutional Tribunal can still say you cannot do that.

It sounds like some of the same issues that the United States is working through. I mean, Levitsky and Ziblatt just recently wrote a book called Tyranny of the Minority and it sounds like some of the same concerns that happen in the United States that prevent political majorities from being able to create new policies because there are so many different players involved and even at the end of the day, there’s still the possibility that policies that are created can still get struck down easily by the courts. I can see how that can be an issue within Chile that has an even more restrictive constitution in many ways that prevent reforms from being accomplished.

Now Chile brought about a constituent assembly that drafted a constitution that was then rejected and I’ve discussed that on the podcast before. What’s new here is that they made a second effort to be able to reform the constitution. Can you talk a little bit about what the structure was for that second effort? How is it that they crafted the constitution? What was it that the voters were actually deciding upon in that second referendum on the constitution?

I wanted to make a point on this Justin. First in the sense that I do think that after the second rejection, we really need to revisit the hypothesis and analysis that many analysts had of the first rejection. I think there was a lot of emphasis put on the institutional process and on the content of the constitution to say that citizens didn’t want such a radical text, sort of a left-wing text. That they rejected the performance of the constitution, the role of indigenous people, of feminism, of independents. What happened, as you know, is that because of that broad belief, particularly by the elites, but by society, that the process had failed because it had gone too far and it hadn’t been able to accommodate a negotiation with the opposition.

Congress and political elites were very discontent with the first process because they felt marginalized from the first process. At first, I think they really rushed to secure a design of a second process and I think that rush to have an agreement on a second process wasn’t necessarily based on a profound diagnosis of why people had rejected the first. It was also kind of an admission that society has a homogeneous reaction. That there is such a thing as the people and the people spoke in one way, in one voice. The second time around you had this design where there was no rules for independents, where there was very little presence of indigenous people, and where political parties had all the control.

Congress appointed a 24-person expert group that was twelve representatives of the center-right, twelve representatives of the center-left. There were not necessarily deep academics writing papers for journals. There were more kind of what Gramsci would call organic intellectuals connected to the political parties. Some of them were in think tanks. Some of them had had political positions. So, they were not necessarily pure academics, but were organic representatives of the political sectors. The good news was that they were able to agree on a text and approve it by broad margins. Then there was an elected council that was really small with a complete different electoral design than the first convention that really inhibited the possibility of representatives that were not political party members to be elected and also really, I think, overrepresented the right.

So, what you had was a political party-controlled process that was completely different from the process before and it had a shorter time. It did have a participatory process but different from the one in the first place. So, you have probably the most different kind of institutional designs that you can have and coincidentally, the products that they produced were radically different. If in the first process, you had sort of every dream of progressive people enshrined in a constitution in terms of environment, women’s reproductive rights, indigenous people’s rights, social rights and all sorts of other things.

The second time around what happened was something that probably few had expected. You had a more conservative constitution than the one drafted during the dictatorship. More conservative in terms of not just keeping the subsidiary role of the state, but going beyond that subsidiary role of the state and making an even more neoliberal take on that, restricting the role of the state in all aspects. But then this neoliberal take was combined with a recent conservative take on society that was brought about because in the election of the council the party that won the majority of the seats was a new rightwing party that was similar to what’s happening in the Dutch system of a rightwing party or the National Party in France or the Vox Party in Spain.

In all these countries, you have kind of populist, radical rightwing parties that compete with the mainstream right wing. So, in Chile, this party is called Partido Republicano, Republican Party, and it won the majority. They are a mixture of populism, authoritarian, but very conservative. There’s a lot of Christian ideas there. So, you ended up with a constitution that was in process and system completely different from the first. That’s why I said at the beginning that I think we really need to revisit how much of the rejection has to do with particular content and the process and how much has to do with politics and the relationship between citizens and institutions in Chile that existed before the constitutional process, but that have remained in a way, unaltered by the constitutional processes.

So, I feel like the headlines about the Chilean constitutional process for both draft constitutions have focused on how far the actual constitutions were to the left or to the right. They focus a lot on the substance of what’s in the constitutions. But I feel what’s really remarkable about both processes was how they actually went through the process itself, and in particular, who was brought to the table to actually negotiate in these processes. So, in the first constitution, the first draft constitution, it feels that they brought in multiple elements of society. But people who identified more with the political right felt very marginalized. So, it felt very inclusive in terms of different elements of society, but didn’t necessarily give the impression that it was inclusive of all different ideologies within Chilean society.

The second draft constitution began with something that felt a little bit more ideologically inclusive. It started with, as you said, this panel of people that put together a proposed constitution, almost quasi experts or people that were from the different political parties. It was balanced between the center-left and the center-right and they negotiated between one another into something that was somewhat ideologically representative, but it didn’t include people from other elements of the society. Like you said, it didn’t include elements from the indigenous peoples. It didn’t necessarily include feminists. It focused very much on inclusion of the key elites, but didn’t focus on those other people. Then when the participatory element was introduced, it was heavily favored to the political right so that they, as you said, made it even more lopsided to the political right.

So again, I think it’s interesting how the constitutional process tries to be inclusive and what groups are actually asked to be at the table. It feels like that’s really one of the big questions that I think is on everybody’s mind. How inclusive is this process really? Who’s left out of the discussion? Who’s left out of the process? It feels like that’s really what people have been rejecting is both of these processes feel like they leave out different groups and that they’re not representative of the entire society, but the representative of different parts of society, whether it’s on the left or the right. Did you walk away from these processes feeling the same way? Do you feel like part of the problem is a question of inclusion and who’s actually involved in the process?

Yes, I think that the experience of Chile ratifies something that I think constitutional experts and scholars have said of other processes in the sense that it’s almost impossible to have a successful constitutional process if you don’t include key stakeholders and incumbents. If you try to draft a constitution against traditional elites, they have enough power in different dimensions in order for them to boycott the process. I think that’s what happened in the first round in the sense that the convention had antagonized, not just political parties, but the elites in general. So, elites were transversely from the right to the left against the process. You cannot push a process through without the elites sitting at the table. The second process shows that having the elites dominate the table, sitting alone at the table, is not guaranteed to have legitimacy either.

For me, Justin, I think one of the most profound questions and I think probably one of the things that we will continue to debate for many decades is that while maybe a lot of people do not say that, but I think when you listen to different analyses, a lot of people have the expectation that a constitutional process is going to function different from or isolated from or uncontaminated by politics, by the way that regular politics works. The reason why Chile arrived at the 2019 social revolt had to do in a substantial way because of a crisis of representation, because there were no formal institutional mechanisms that allowed society to express itself. Society perceived political elites and economically elites as self-serving. There was increasing malaise and protest against what was perceived elites separating from society.

Also, the political system had been experiencing this profound fragmentation and polarization. Despite this detachment from society, you see a very polarized political system and political parties. What happened was that in both processes, what was evident to me, was that politics continued to function as it was functioning. The ironic or sad part of this is that you had the opportunity to solve a problem through the constitutional process, a problem of this disconnection between society and institutions and politics. But when politics has to solve the problems that it has caused, how can politics do that?

So, I recently talked to Katlyn Carter and she wrote a book called Democracy in Darkness that was absolutely fascinating where she compares the American constitutional process to the French constitutional process. She’s looking at it from the lens of transparency and secrecy and the way that publicity was being done at that time. The American constitutional process was famously done entirely in secrecy. They didn’t talk about it. They weren’t allowed to be able to discuss it outside of the room that they were in. The French constitutional process was done with an audience on purpose and it was designed that way.

The Chilean constitutional convention, the very first one, the one that created the initial draft constitution, reminds me much more of the French constitutional process. It seems that people were oftentimes even performing to the crowd. Not that they had a crowd there, but because social media allows you to be able to discuss things to the wider public, effectively, they were performing to a crowd oftentimes. Some of the speeches, some of the proposals were being done, not so much to be able to create trust with the people at the convention, but to be able to play to a political group or to be able to make a statement.

I just wonder if maybe that’s part of the problem – the way that social media has been injected to make everything a political communications battle rather than being something that created a real effort to be able to create trust and legitimacy with all of the different people that were involved in the process and to create a sense of working together as a group. Something that everybody could get behind rather than something that would push forward some kind of point that they were trying to make or win a political debate rather than actually create a functional constitution that the entire country could be proud of.

Yeah. I think that’s right on the dot, Justin. I think the Chilean process was the first constitutional replacement that took place after what’s been a revolution of social media and the impact of artificial intelligence on how political campaigns and politicians relate to citizens. Because when compared to Colombia in 1991 or the Tunisian convention, all of those processes took place before this transformation. I also think that this is a case where it’s ratified in the sense that in Chile, as in many countries in Latin America, the push for transparency in politics is a reaction to this perception of corruption and an elite serving themselves that had been really, really adamant.

So, you already had Congress and even the judicial power and all public institutions under a rule by an access to information. For instance, all commissions of Congress in Chile are transmitted live or are recorded and you can watch them afterwards. So, by the time the convention began, and I think that’s something that often is overlooked, they already put in all the cameras and all that process, because that was the standard for legislative debate. You couldn’t have a constitutional convention that didn’t even meet the minimum standard of every other state institution. The same thing happened with the second process. Things were transmitted live. It had lower ratings than the first process, but they were there. I think that, as you said, a lot of conventional members and political parties were more preoccupied with the performance dimension of the debate.

You saw, for instance, in both places, a lot of taking facts out of context. This time around, people that wanted the text to be approved would be particularly present on TikTok showing videos. There’s a study that shows the amount of money that political parties invested in social media campaigns, even before the campaign started. A lot of the convention members both times around related to their electorate through social media without necessarily being true to what the other side was saying. They just wanted to make a point.

So, how will constitutional processes function is the same question I think that we have every day on how representative democracy is surviving in this new era where social media and artificial intelligence are becoming such a relevant dimension of politics. That’s something that we haven’t really finished understanding and social science needs to understand the way people make decisions.

Something that we haven’t mentioned is that it’s really remarkable that both draft constitutions were rejected in Chile. Because typically, publics ratify constitutions once they’re proposed. It’s really rare for the people to vote down a constitution once it’s put in front of them and that happens for constitutions that are produced in a very deliberative and nonpartisan manner and it happens for consultations that are created that are highly partisan and constructed in an extremely polarized fashion as well. The public generally supports the new constitutions.

I think that political scientists have generally felt that the reason why they do is because they don’t understand it. They don’t understand the process. It’s got a lot of stuff in the constitution that’s very legalistic and jargony, so it’s easier just to vote in favor of it, particularly if the politicians they supported in the past election are supporting the new constitution. It’s a bit refreshing that Chileans actually voted down the two constitutions because in some ways it’s much more politically sophisticated to say, ‘I’m not sure if I completely agree with this process if there’s this much disagreement and this much frustration over this constitution that’s in front of me. Maybe this isn’t the right constitution right now, regardless of what’s actually in it.’

So, I kind of wonder if the rejection of these constitutions is in some ways a positive development because it shows that Chileans are willing to wait for the right constitution and wait for the right moment to be able to put together the new constitution that they want to be able to live under. Do you feel that way or do you feel that they really missed a real opportunity to be able to move on past the Pinochet legacy of the 1980 constitution?

I think I’m a bit torn between the two in the sense that I always thought that the constitutional process was not only important because of the content, but because of the process. I expected that a successful constitutional process was a moment of reckoning and saying, ‘Okay, there’s a deteriorating relationship between the political elites and citizens. We’ve listened to your voice and we’re going to have this moment of being able to come together. It was something that probably should have happened during the transition that wasn’t able to be done. So in that sense, I’m of course disappointed in a way that this solution, to not just try to build a new social contract that responded to people’s demands in terms of social issues, but also this opportunity to come together and draft democratically a new social contract wasn’t able to be successful.

I have to be honest on that side, but on the other hand, I do think that as you say that this process opens up all sorts of questions regarding things that we have taken for granted. It’s very rare that plebiscites are rejected. I’ve listened to a lot of constitutional Latin American specialists who have reflected on it. For instance, Roberto Gargarella had always said that a plebiscite is a bad way of deciding a constitution because it narrows down everything to black and white, yes and no. I might like that water rights are not privatized, but I’m really against the enshrining of women’s reproductive rights in the Constitution. So, if I vote is it because of the water or because of abortion? You don’t have a choice. You have this big, really long text. You have to buy in the whole bit.

Other people have mentioned that it was uncommon to have such high approval thresholds within a convention as it was the case in Chile in the first case. You needed two thirds for every article, two thirds for the whole text. It was a whole debate on really high quorums for everything with a really representative body: gender parity; reserved seats for indigenous people; lists for independents; political parties; really proportional representative electoral system. So, you had all these mechanisms to assure top level representational standards, but at the same time, you’ve said, well, that’s not good enough. We still don’t trust representation enough. So, we need direct democracy at the end. Two thirds for everything, but still, you have to submit the text to a final referendum.

As I said, it was often the case, for instance, in the case of Columbia, in the case of Ecuador, in a lot of cases, once you elected the constitutional assembly, it was the constitutional assembly that approved the text. You didn’t need another approval step and I think the standard is going to probably be now that you need both. But it’s a very complex mixture to be able to construct legitimacy and make this direct democracy mechanism work with representation. So, I do think with the way that both of those things work, we need to reflect on how can we propose systems that are inclusive, representative, but that also allow the text to be approved. Because if you put in so many hurdles, it’s going to be increasingly such a difficult thing to approve a text.

So, I felt that the Chilean process focused a lot on formal mechanisms to demonstrate broad support rather than informal ones. When I talked to Hassen Ebrahim about the South African constitutional process, he mentioned that where they started was to find all the areas that had near unanimous agreement and to get those off the table. It turned out that they were actually really surprised how much unanimity there was on things that they thought were going to be contentious issues that they could just move on from and say this is part of the text. That’s part of the text. Then all of the difficult issues were set aside.

If you set up any kind of mechanism to say we’re going to put this into effect as long as it has this amount of support, it allows you to put in some contentious stuff that might rub people the wrong way in early on. Even though it might have broad support, it doesn’t necessarily have everybody’s support, so it makes it difficult to be able to move forward and build that trust. I mean, South Africa really built that trust in an environment that you could argue was much more polarized and much more contentious than anything happening in Chile at the time.

South Africa was trying to create a constitution to be able to move out of apartheid and yet they found that there was broad support on a lot of issues about human rights and different things that they did not expect there to be broad support for. I just wonder if the emphasis on formal mechanisms to establish what constitutes broad support was part of the problem. That instead of looking at informal mechanisms to find the areas that pretty much everybody agrees with and that you can pretty much put up to a vote of acclamation and say these are some areas that we’re going to include before moving on to those more contentious debates.

It just feels like there was a real opportunity lost in terms of the process from the very beginning in terms of how Chile established that process. I mean, do you feel that way or do you feel like I’m missing something in terms of how it worked?

I think once again, Justin, that you cannot look at the constitutional process in isolation. I think in South Africa, right after the transition, you had massive legitimacy of political actors. In Chile you’re coming out of a process where the opposition had tried twice to impeach the president. You had a process where the military were out on the streets. You had more than 500 people that had lost eyes or had ocular injuries because of overhanded reaction of the police to the prospects. You had four human rights independent organizations, including the high commissioner of human rights, with statements saying that human rights had been violated and you had a really, really polarized political system and citizens with a complete distrust of political agreements.

Anything that is an informal agreement in Chile, even until today is perceived to be suspicious. It is perceived to be anti-democratic. So, on the one hand, that’s why the political parties agreed to have independents running to compete with them. In a way they did not have a choice because if they didn’t do that the process would have been perceived as coopted by political parties and political parties were the culprits. They were being rejected. All these formalities work in a way to provide legitimacy to appease people and to say this is going to be different from Congress. This is going to be different from the way politicians act all the time. This is really going to be democratic. This is really going to be representative.

The second time around, because the atmosphere had changed so drastically, political parties, once again, were able to design a more traditional representative party. But at the beginning, I don’t really know if that was possible. The second thing has to do with the confirmation of the first convention. The fact that 66 percent of the people elected were not party militants and a lot of them, over 50%, were representatives of social movements. I’ve had this argument with many people where they ask why didn’t these people understand that they couldn’t have everything that they wanted. That they couldn’t have sexual and reproductive rights, water rights, indigenous representation, education… That you couldn’t have everything.

I think that it’s a way of not understanding who these people were. If you are a feminist activist from a feminist grassroots organization and you’ve spent the last 20 years of your life campaigning for reproductive rights, you’re not going to sit at a table and say I’m going to leave abortion out and approve the water rights and go back to my constituency and say water rights are more important than abortion. That’s just not the way politics works and the way that people felt that they were representing their constituents. They’re not political parties that are looking at representing the entire society in a government. It’s a different way of functioning. That’s why I think that we need to understand the politics behind the institution and the proceedings to understand a lot of these decisions.

Well, my heart will hope that this is an exception, but my rationality would say that I do think that the Chilean case is going to have a deterrent effect on other countries and other movements around the world that are looking for ways to establish new social contracts. I think the idea that you need to draft a new constitution as the main vehicle or the best vehicle to bring about profound reform is probably going to be looked with skepticism after this. There were a lot of people looking at this process with expectations that it could have served as an example to push other countries that want to update their normative frameworks to the 21st century with environmental crisis, with all the things that we know are happening. I think that it’s probably for a while it’s going to be a deterrent in that sense.

I also think that one of the good things that came about from this process is because of everything that happened, the threshold for reforming the current constitution went down. So, there is a democratic possibility of Congress tackling some of the aspects that require transformation in Chile. But I think that’s probably not going to happen anytime soon. The president has announced that all the parties have set in really firm and I think credible terms that they’re not going to embark on any request for constitutional reforms anytime soon. So, I do think that at least Chileans are going to have to wait – I don’t know how long, but probably for a good while – to embark on a new process again.