After tracing the social, intellectual, and political origins of Chile’s demand for a new Constitution (which started in circumscribed circles as early as the late 1990s, but got momentum towards the end of the 2000s), this article describes the semi-sovereign democracy established by the Constitution of 1980, a feature designed by its framers to prevent the dismantling of the particularly radical version of neoliberal economics left in place by the military regime. Then, the piece analyses how the Constitutional Court’s conservative jurisprudence contributed to make clear to most Chileans the link between an increasingly unpopular economic model and the constitutional status quo, something which, in turn, led President Bachelet to attempt to introduce a new charter in her second administration (an effort which failed due to the refusal of the conservative parties to replace a fundamental law that was, in fact, largely biased towards their political and economic ideas). The second half of the article is devoted to analyse the way in which the social uprising of October–December 2019 transformed the old demand for a new Constitution into a critically important institutional way to channel what at the time seemed to be a potentially catastrophic social and political crisis. Noting the—rather impressive—capacity of the political party system to agree on the path towards a new charter, the article then argues that Chile’s highly regulated constitution-making process represents an instance of what Colón-Ríos (2020) calls a ‘procedurally regulated’ one, that is, one where an existing constitution is amended to authorize its complete replacement according to the procedures it establishes, but leaving the constituent body leeway to autonomously decide on the content of the new charter. While in tension with traditional understandings of the exercise of the constituent power in cases of complete constitutional change, this feature of Chile’s ongoing constitution-making process represents a promising path to introduce a new Constitution in a manner that promotes the rule of law.

在追溯了智利对新宪法（早在 1990 年代末开始在有限范围内开始，但在 2000 年代末开始发展）的要求的社会、知识和政治根源之后，本文描述了建立的半主权民主根据 1980 年宪法，这是其制定者设计的一项功能，以防止军政府遗留下来的特别激进的新自由主义经济学版本被瓦解。然后，这篇文章分析了宪法法院的保守判例如何向大多数智利人阐明日益不受欢迎的经济模式与宪法现状之间的联系，反过来，导致巴切莱特总统试图在她的第二届政府中引入一项新宪章（由于保守党拒绝取代一项实际上在很大程度上偏向于他们的政治和经济理念的基本法律，这一努力失败了）。文章的后半部分专门分析了 2019 年 10 月至 12 月的社会起义如何将新宪法的旧需求转变为至关重要的制度方式，以引导当时似乎具有潜在灾难性的社会和政治危机。文章注意到政党系统在制定新宪章的道路上达成一致的能力——相当令人印象深刻，然后认为智利高度监管的宪法制定过程代表了科隆-里奥斯 (2020) 所谓的“程序监管”的一个例子。 ' 一，也就是说，修改现有宪法以授权根据其建立的程序完全替换它，但给组成机构留有自主决定新宪章内容的余地。虽然与在宪法完全改变的情况下行使制宪权的传统理解存在紧张关系，但智利正在进行的制宪过程的这一特点代表了以促进法治的方式引入新宪法的有希望的途径。