Chile: Court Rules Against Government Appeal on Pensions

With seven votes against, the Plenary of the Chilean Constitutional Court (TC) refused to process the unconstitutionality request that the Government filed seeking to challenge the third pension fund (AFP) withdrawal bill that Congress passed into law.

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The withdrawal was prompted by the opposition and was sent out of Congress, which approved it with a devastating majority last Friday.

The seven votes against the appeal came from Rodrigo Pica, Nelson Pozo, José Ignacio Vásquez, María Pía Silva, Juan José Romero, Gonzalo García and Iván Aróstica, while the three votes in favor were from the ministers Miguel Ángel Fernández, Cristián Letelle and María Luisa Brahm, president of the instance.

La Moneda went to the Constitutional Court last week to block it, under the pretext that the transfer was unconstitutional because it mortgaged the future of Chileans and would leave almost five of the 11,000,000 people enrolled in the private pension system without pension funds.

After the rejection of the appeal by the TC, President Pinera said that he would approve the bill. 

"This is a huge defeat for the Government. It did not foresee the effects that sending this bill, approved with more than two-thirds in Congress, to the TC could have", said the pro-government congressman, Iván Moreira.

For her part,  opposition lawmaker, Pamela Jiles, expressed that, in her opinion, "it is the end of Piñera's government in practice."

"I don't know how long Piñera will be able to continue in La Moneda, but he will be vegetating; he will be an ornament. Today is the end of Piñera's government, curiously, at the hands of that Jaime Guzmán's anti-democratic monstrosity, which is the TC", she concluded.