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President Michelle Bachelet said on Wednesday that she was determined to make Chilean democracy more representative.
For the first time in a quarter of a century, there may be enough votes in Congress to achieve it.
Ms Bachelet wants to end an electoral system that has squeezed out independent candidates and guaranteed an outsized presence in Congress for Chile’s centre-right coalition ever since the end of the 17-year dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in 1990.
The system distorts the vote by giving half the seats in each district to the trailing coalition, as long as it gets at least a third of the votes.
In practice, that has meant many elections are decided behind closed doors, with the centre-left and centre-right blocs hand-picking candidates to ensure neither side will get its way in Congress.
Gen Pinochet also did away with proportional districts, which denied equal representation for people living in Chile’s biggest cities.
“Let’s call things what they are. It’s a system that owes its life to the dictatorship and that has perpetuated itself through exclusion,” Ms Bachelet said on Wednesday as she signed the proposal, which will now be debated in Congress.
It would increase the number of deputies from 120 to 154 and the number of senators from 38 to 50, assigning seats according to population, rather than only regions.
“It’s not possible that the most populated areas choose the same number of representatives as the least populated sectors,” she said.
This makes it essential to increase our representatives.”
Ms Bachelet expanded the centre-left coalition by bringing in Communist Party members and independents before her landslide victory last year.
The centre-right coalition has splintered in the wake of its defeat, with several members crossing over recently to support key measures, including a constitutional change approved on Tuesday that extends voting rights to Chileans living outside the country.
Just five weeks into her presidency, Ms Bachelet can count on 21 senators and 71 deputies within her coalition and needs just two more Senate votes and one more House vote to push through electoral reform.
