El Estado Social y los derechos sociales como nudo crítico de la crisis constitucional chilena

Abstract

The State formula is one of the recurring issues of Chilean public law since the establishment of the Political Constitution of 1980. The doctrinal and social discussion revolves around two opposing poles: maintaining the main lines of the system established in said Political Charter or constitutionalizing for the first time and expressly the option of the Social and Democratic rule of law. In this sense, the social outbreak of October 2019 has revealed the exhaustion of the subsidiary State imposed by the 1980 constitutional text and the need to build a system that allows for using the grotesque gaps of social and economic inequality that affect Chilean society. The political and legal operators who have led the constituent process under development have agreed on the Welfare State formula as one of the twelve constitutional bases of the new social pact. A different issue, and the core of discord, will be the real and effective scope of the Welfare State clause and its main normative projection: social rights. The thesis that supports this article is clear: the formal constitutionalization of the Welfare State, as a legal and political mandate to the public powers, is the essential step for the materialization of social rights as authentic subjective rights.