The President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, in Davos, Switzerland, on January 18, 2023. Cristian Garavito (Colombian Presidency)
The days of political calm are over. And they even look far away. Colombia has entered a stormy zone and the changes Gustavo Petro promised during the election campaign are now colliding with political tensions, legal or social realities, a booming economy and a frenzy for power materializing in October’s local and regional elections becomes .
This is what the President himself clarified this Saturday, when he reacted to the decision of the Attorney General to suspend the director of the entity that manages the assets confiscated by the mafia, for having decided against executing a contract due to legal doubts : “What do we see before us in this fact alone? It’s the first ‘bell’, hardly. It is the first step they have taken to try to prevent us from doing what we have publicly promised and what 11.5 million powerful voters, male and female, young and old, have chosen to do Change in Colombia”.
Quite a contrast to the previous semester, when there was a certain serenity thanks to the honeymoon of a new government and some initial projects that marked a lesser break from previous years. “A lot of things are happening at the same time,” summarizes the analyst and political strategist Carlos Suárez.
Until now, Petro’s priority, with a headless and scattered opposition, would have been to get the money needed to shore up his changes. He achieved it by conducting an ambitious tax reform in collections and with some political messages, but not revolutionary. It also marked a political north with total peace, a well-known north in a country where all governments of the past 40 years have tried in different ways and with different logics to negotiate with the so-called armed actors. They were months of relative serenity. That stayed behind. “You can see the storm coming,” says Pablo Lemoine, President of the polling institute Centro Nacional de Consultoría.
This storm is latent tension. The President has announced that this Monday he will present his health care reform, the most talked about of the major welfare reforms he plans to put before Congress this year. She has also called for demonstrations this Tuesday in support of this project. The opposition has done the same by rejecting the reform for Wednesday. They are called to the social mobilization that is keeping Iván Duque’s government in check around a project whose details are not known.
The dispute arises not because of facts, but because of anticipation of what is to come. Justice Minister Néstor Osuna synthesized this feeling that something is coming in a recent interview with this newspaper: “We are at the beginning of a period of change,” he said. On the other hand, businessman Germán Efromovich agrees: “Without a doubt, there is a lot of instability, a lot of doubts.”
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The mood is not positive. Polling firm Datexco’s latest measurement for W Radio, the first major poll of 2023, shows a pessimistic country: 55% of respondents answered that Colombia was on a bad path, while it has not exceeded 41% since Petro’s election. The figure isn’t far off the 66% of respondents who responded to Invamer in December believing things are improving in the country. Above all, the trend is the same: after a few months of enthusiasm and calm, pessimism has ruled the country.
But it’s not uncommon pessimism. The numbers are similar to those found in polls since 2014 with the governments of Juan Manuel Santos and Iván Duque. Rather, what is new is that this emotional shift is occurring as the government begins to refine its agenda for change. This creates fear, fear in some, hope in others. A fear that brings fear and uncertainty.
The journalist María Elvira Samper explains it this way: “During the government of Juan Manuel Santos and the referendum for peace, there were more tensions, also because there was an organized opposition. I see more of a sense of confusion, of insecurity.”
Knowing the text of the health care reform is perhaps a first step in turning doubt into enthusiasm or rejection. Also the size and strength of the demonstrations this week, and even more so the extent to which the President is stepping up his call to the streets. “This Tuesday I will be waiting for you on the balcony of the Nariño Palace and in all the public squares in the country. Let’s do everything for the change of Colombia for the benefit of the Colombian people,” Petro met this Saturday via Twitter, his favorite and daily means of communication. Even, as Samper says, the debate on the National Development Plan in Congress will provide clues, particularly in political terms. But the capsizing is unlikely to pass any time soon.
On the one hand, economic uncertainty remains. Inflation isn’t abating, and so are interest rate hikes. Forecasts of near-zero growth this year, repeated by the Banco de la República to the OECD, suggest that uncertainty will persist for the near term.
On the other hand, the controversies and political arguments continue. Although President Gustavo Petro and Bogotá Mayor Claudia López have agreed to restore the working groups to define the future of the Bogotá Metro, the future remains a work that touches self-esteem and the possibility of improving mobility in the balance of Bogotanos.
Even as internal tensions among cabinet members have eased, hot-button issues that fueled them remain up in the air. Among them are the definition of energy tariffs, means of buying land for agrarian reform, the concretization of the discussed points of health care reform or the definition of the future of hydrocarbon exploration. And most importantly, politicians are beginning to prepare their campaigns for the October elections.
The feeling of fear can be useful for this, as Diana Calderón explained in her video blog last week. Behind the sense of chaos, the director of Hora 20 finds a government strategy: polarization as a political calculus to achieve his goals in October’s local elections. Strategist and political analyst Carlos Suárez agrees with this reading: “Talking about decriminalizing incest while calling for extraordinary powers for the president in the development plan is a clear strategy to stoke emotions and feelings,” he explains.
For Suárez and Calderón, the background is the election campaign, in the short term through the October elections and behind it in the long term the establishment of a political structure allied with Petro in the municipal and departmental powers. This is how the strategist puts it: “Petro must stay in power. To do this, they have to win the regional elections, because there, in the regions, their revolution has not yet fully triumphed. For this reason, he classifies Claudia as contradictory and incites Bogotá; in Medellín Mayor Quintero is doing the same; in Cali they are looking for someone to ride; in Barranquilla they are trying to defeat the char in court and in narrative,” he says.
The difficult thing is defining how to do that and at the same time carrying out the reforms, Samper analyses: he must both maintain a broad legislative coalition and face a majority of these allies in their local strongholds. be both a rival and a friend. “Petro has to think very carefully about how to ensure that the coalition in Congress doesn’t collapse,” he says, referring to the internal struggles in pro-government parties such as the Conservatives and the Greens. “There is a trade-off between that and the electoral interests of Petro and his legislative allies.”
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