—Benjamín Alemparte, Assistant Professor of Constitutional Law, University of Chile
Constitutions do not change only through formal amendment. Bruce Ackerman famously used the concept of constitutional politics to describe those rare moments in which extraordinary episodes of popular mobilization transform higher law outside ordinary constitutional procedures. I use the term differently. My concern is not with constitutional moments, but with the gradual emergence of governing practices that reshape the practical operation of constitutional democracy without altering the constitutional text. From this perspective, constitutional politics refers to the informal transformation of constitutional arrangements through changes in the way political institutions interact, laws are produced, and public authority is exercised.
It is in this sense that Chile’s current National Reconstruction Bill deserves constitutional attention. The proposal is not merely a collection of policy reforms, but part of a broader governing pattern increasingly visible across contemporary democracies. Particularly among contemporary right-populist and radical-right governments, large-scale omnibus legislation has emerged as a vehicle for advancing ambitious programs of political and institutional transformation through a single legislative package. From Argentina’s Ley de Bases y Puntos de Partida para la Libertad de los Argentinos under President Javier Milei to the United States’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act promoted by President Donald Trump, governments are increasingly relying on integrated legislative packages to advance wide-ranging agendas through a single legislative vehicle. These initiatives combine diverse and often unrelated policy domains—taxation, public spending, migration, administrative reform, social policy, energy, education, or economic regulation—within comprehensive packages presented as necessary responses to moments of national urgency or reconstruction. Chile’s proposal follows precisely this logic. By consolidating tax reform, fiscal retrenchment, migration control, administrative restructuring, investment regulation, housing measures, and social policy into a single legislative package, it reflects a mode of governance that seeks not only to implement particular policies but also to restructure the procedural framework through which political conflict is debated and managed.
This post argues that Chile’s National Reconstruction Bill should be understood not simply as a legislative reform package, but as an example of a broader constitutional transformation in which reconstruction discourse, emergency narratives, and omnibus legislation combine to reshape the institutional conditions of democratic disagreement by concentrating agenda-setting power, compressing deliberation, and strengthening executive-centered modes of governance.
Omnibus Legislation as Constitutional Politics
This is why omnibus politics is not merely a technical legislative device. It reflects a broader transformation in the practice of democratic governance. As Barbara Sinclair observed in her work on “unorthodox lawmaking,” large integrated legislative packages tend to emerge when ordinary legislative procedures come to appear too fragmented, too slow, or too politically costly for governing coalitions. The result is a lawmaking process increasingly organized around executive coordination, centralized bargaining, and accelerated political timelines rather than differentiated parliamentary deliberation. Recent work by the International IDEA situates these developments within a broader literature on democratic backsliding, emphasizing how the manipulation of parliamentary procedures, agenda control, legislative urgency, and oversight mechanisms can gradually weaken democratic accountability while concentrating political power within executive-centered governing coalitions.
Reconstruction, Emergency, and Executive Constitutionalism in Chile
Chile’s National Reconstruction Bill (Proyecto de Ley para la Reconstrucción Nacional y el Desarrollo Económico y Social), provides a particularly revealing example of this broader phenomenon. Submitted by the newly elected right-conservative government of President José Antonio Kast little more than a month after taking office, the proposal consolidates a wide range of policy domains—including taxation, migration, housing, social policy, investment regulation, employment, and higher education financing—within a single legislative package. The initiative reduces the corporate tax rate from 27 percent to 23 percent, creates incentives for capital repatriation, introduces temporary housing relief, and accelerates investment permits and administrative procedures.
Kast and his coalition have repeatedly described the administration as a “government of emergency,” portraying Chile as fiscally irresponsible, administratively ineffective, increasingly incapable of preserving public order through existing institutional mechanisms, and, in the words of government officials, economically “broke.” Yet the country is far from facing an existential crisis or institutional collapse. The constitutional significance of this rhetoric therefore lies less in its response to an immediate breakdown than in the political framework it establishes. By presenting fiscal imbalance, economic stagnation, administrative inefficiency, irregular migration, and declining public security as interconnected symptoms of a broader national emergency, the government advances a diagnosis that appears to require reconstruction rather than ordinary democratic reform. During the presidential campaign, Kast mobilized support around precisely this narrative, proposing measures such as the construction of a trench along Chile’s northern frontier and presenting irregular migration not merely as a border issue but as a threat to state capacity itself.
In Chile, the language of reconstruction carries a distinctive constitutional history. During the military dictatorship (1973–1990), “national reconstruction” became the justificatory language of constitutional refoundation. Official documents of the period described the post-1973 regime not merely as a temporary government, but as the beginning of a “new institutional and political order” tasked with morally, economically, and institutionally rebuilding the country after the alleged exhaustion of the previous democratic system. Under that diagnosis, exceptional authority ceased to appear temporary and instead became politically necessary. The relevance of this history is not that the current government seeks to reproduce the dictatorship. Chile remains a competitive constitutional democracy, and the differences between the two political contexts are profound. The continuity lies elsewhere: in a recurring constitutional logic through which political disagreement is increasingly portrayed as evidence of institutional incapacity and ordinary democratic procedures come to appear inadequate to the challenges facing the nation.
In that context, reconstruction becomes more than a legislative label. It becomes a way of legitimizing stronger executive authority, accelerated decision-making, and institutional restructuring in the name of political necessity. Finance Minister Jorge Quiroz, a primus inter pares within Kast’s cabinet, reinforced that framing by initially proposing a uniform 3 percent reduction in public expenditure across all ministries, presenting fiscal retrenchment not merely as a budgetary adjustment but as part of a broader strategy of national recovery. Yet decisions about what the state withdraws from, preserves, or strengthens are never purely technical. They reflect competing judgments about public priorities, institutional capacity, and the role of government itself. The broader constitutional logic became even more visible when Quiroz warned that, should Congress fail to approve the government’s proposed “mega-reform,” the administration would “keep governing anyway” because “there are also decrees.” He later emphasized that the government had been “governing with management and decrees from day one,” framing legislative approval less as a constitutional necessity than as a contingent political obstacle.
The Constitutional Costs of Omnibus Legislation
The implications of this governing logic extend beyond executive rhetoric. They are embedded in the institutional design of the National Reconstruction Bill itself. Once reconstruction is framed as a national imperative, legislative disagreement risks appearing less as a normal feature of democratic government than as a source of delay. In this context, omnibus legislation becomes particularly attractive. By consolidating multiple policy domains into a single legislative vehicle, it transforms differentiated political disagreements into a broader vote on reconstruction itself. Parliamentarians may support some reforms while opposing others, yet the structure of the bill pressures political actors toward a binary choice: either support reconstruction or obstruct it.
This is where Jeremy Waldron’s insights in Law and Disagreement become especially relevant. Democratic legislation possesses a distinctive dignity precisely because it transforms social disagreement into structured public deliberation. Legislatures are valuable not merely because of the laws they ultimately produce, but because they provide the institutional setting through which a political community processes disagreement through visible, differentiated, and accountable procedures. From this perspective, the constitutional significance of omnibus legislation lies not simply in the policies it advances but in the way it reorganizes the conditions under which disagreement is expressed and negotiated within democratic institutions.
The result is not only legislative acceleration but a contraction of democratic scrutiny itself. By fusing taxation, migration, housing, investment regulation, administrative reform, and social policy into a single legislative package, omnibus legislation compresses multiple political controversies into a single act of approval or rejection. Legislators, journalists, civil society organizations, and even state agencies can no longer evaluate each reform with the degree of attention that constitutional democracy ordinarily presupposes. Political responsibility also becomes harder to trace. Citizens struggle to identify who supported which measures, while legislators face increasing pressure to accept or reject the package as a whole regardless of their position on individual provisions. Democratic accountability, legal coherence, and public transparency begin to erode together.
The deeper constitutional question raised by Chile’s current moment is therefore not whether the country requires economic reform, fiscal restraint, or administrative modernization. Constitutional democracies routinely debate all three. The question is whether the combination of reconstruction discourse, emergency narratives, and omnibus governance is gradually transforming the institutional conditions under which democratic disagreement takes place. From this perspective, the issue is not the adoption of any particular policy, but the emergence of a governing logic that increasingly privileges urgency over deliberation, executive coordination over parliamentary differentiation, and political necessity over institutional contestation.
Whether Chile’s National Reconstruction Bill ultimately becomes law in its current form is, in some respects, secondary to the broader constitutional question it raises. The proposal has already cleared its first constitutional stage in the Chamber of Deputies and is currently being debated in the Senate, suggesting that substantial portions of the package may ultimately become law. What is already clear, however, is that the bill has introduced into Chilean politics a mode of governance centered on reconstruction, urgency, and large-scale legislative aggregation. The lasting significance of the current moment may therefore lie not only in the reforms that emerge from this legislative process, but in the precedent it establishes for future governments. Constitutional change does not always occur through formal amendment. Sometimes it emerges through the consolidation of new governing practices that alter the relationship between executive authority, legislative deliberation, and democratic contestation. The constitutional politics of Chile’s reconstruction agenda may ultimately lie in that quieter, but potentially more enduring, transformation.
Suggested citation: Benjamin Alemparte, The Constitutional Politics of Chile’s National Reconstruction, Jun 18, 2026, at: http://www.iconnectblog.com/the-constitutional-politics-of-chiles-national-reconstruction/