Countries Quietly Rewriting Their Constitutions

As legal scholar Richard Albert observed in Constitutional Amendments: Making, Breaking, and Changing Constitutions (2019):

“The making, breaking, and changing of constitutions is both a roadmap for navigating the intellectual universe of constitutional amendments and a blueprint for building and improving the rules of constitutional change.”

We are currently navigating that blueprint, as several nations quietly undertake comprehensive constitutional revisions. This wave of institutional restructuring is driven by collapsing trust in public governance, profound economic instability, and an urgent demand for updated state frameworks in the post-pandemic era.

While the COVID-19 crisis is frequently cited as a turning point, the pandemic primarily exposed pre-existing structural vulnerabilities within state constitutional designs. These governance shifts manifest in distinct ways — such as Mexico’s judicial overhaul, Chile’s search for a renewed social contract, and Sri Lanka’s efforts to decentralise executive authority. Together, they reflect a global movement toward reforming foundational rules, either to restore democratic stability or to consolidate executive control.

While constitutional revisions offer genuine opportunities for democratic renewal, systemic overhauls carry high stakes. In particular, they present a significant risk of eroding institutional checks and balances if not pursued through transparent, participatory, and democratic processes.

Mexico: Judicial Restructuring and the Electoral Box

In 2024–2025, Mexico enacted a historic judicial reform. Under this framework, voters will directly elect Supreme Court justices, appellate magistrates, and lower court judges, departing from traditional merit-based judicial appointments.

The primary architects of this change — former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and President Claudia Sheinbaum — argued that the established judiciary operated as an insular, corrupt elite protecting monied interests, advancing the campaign slogan: “Let the people decide.”

• The Primary Vulnerability: Judicial independence and the rule of law. Can an impartial judiciary function when judges must campaign for public election?
• The Critical Debate: While direct election appears democratic in principle, critics contend that it politicises the administration of justice. A judge relying on campaign financing and electoral popularity faces fundamentally different incentives than a magistrate with lifetime or fixed tenure.

Chile: The Search for a Post-Pinochet Social Contract

In Chile, voters rejected a proposed progressive constitution in a 2022 referendum. A subsequent constitutional council produced a more conservative draft in 2023, which voters also rejected. Today, national debate centers on pursuing piecemeal amendments to the 1980 constitution enacted during the Augusto Pinochet regime.

• Primary Catalyst: The widespread 2019 social protests (Estallido Social), during which millions of Chileans demonstrated against structural inequality, underfunded pension systems, and healthcare disparities — blaming the 1980 charter for entrenching a market-first economic model.
• The Critical Debate: Codifying expanded social rights to housing, welfare, and healthcare carries significant fiscal implications, prompting debate regarding state debt levels and long-term economic growth.

Sri Lanka: Curtailing Executive Dominance

Sri Lanka has initiated legislative measures to limit the powers of the executive presidency following the severe 2022 economic crisis, International Monetary Fund (IMF) restructuring requirements, and mass public protests.

Current legislative initiatives aim to reduce concentrated presidential authority while restoring independent oversight commissions governing police administration, electoral integrity, and anti-corruption enforcement.

• The Primary Vulnerability: Executive accountability versus administrative decisiveness. Reallocating executive power reduces the risk of autocratic governance running the national economy into the ground, but it may also slow executive decision-making during future national crises.

Renewal versus Erosion: The Unseen Frontier

These comparative case studies highlight common global patterns — notably a pervasive distrust of political elites, where reformers frame political dynamics as “the people” versus “the system.” They also reflect varying approaches to authority: Sri Lanka seeks to decentralise power, Mexico seeks to direct judicial power through the electorate, and Chile debates the baseline guarantees provided by the state.

Systemic constitutional amendments generally lead toward two contrasting outcomes:

1. Democratic Renewal: Modernising constitutional rules to address climate change, technological shifts, and structural inequality — expanding civic participation and fixing failed administrative mechanisms.
2. Institutional Erosion: Invoking popular sovereignty to dismantle judicial independence, restrict media freedoms, and concentrate power within a single executive office or ruling party.

The boundary between renewal and erosion is determined not merely by referendum outcomes, but by who drafts the text, who participates in legislative debate, and how voting procedures are structured. Most constitutional revisions are decided not during public street demonstrations, but through technical negotiations in parliamentary committee rooms.

We are entering an era defined not only by recurring elections, but by fundamental constitutional rewrites. The central question remains whether citizens will engage in the technical, foundational stages of legislative drafting to ensure democratic blueprints truly strengthen public governance rather than entrenching masked hegemony.

References

1. Albert, R. (2019). Constitutional Amendments: Making, Breaking, and Changing Constitutions. Oxford University Press.
2. Reuters. (2024, September 11). In Triumph for Mexico’s Outgoing President, Lawmakers Finalise Courts Overhaul. Reuters World News.
3. Mayer Brown Legal Analysis. (2024, October). Mexico’s Judicial Reform Takes Effect: Assessing its Structural Impact. Legal Insights.
4. Constitutional Convention Secretariat. (2024). Chilean Constitutional Referendum Outcomes and Background. Official Documentation.
5. Legislative Secretariat of Sri Lanka. (2022). The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution: Restoring Independent Oversight Commissions. Parliament of Sri Lanka.