“The law is the power of those who have no power,” said Gustavo Petro at the end of his inaugural address, the tenth of his commitments: to uphold and enforce the Constitution. This pledge goes to the heart of the less obvious challenge, but perhaps the toughest and most comprehensive, that his government will face and which will be an inseparable part of his mandate, just as it was in his career up to the House of Nariño: Colombian democracy finds itself in a crisis. Or rather its support by the population and thus the credibility of the system and its parts in front of the citizenry.
That democracy is in crisis has become commonplace in the Americas region, but there are solid reasons to believe it runs particularly deep in Colombia. The standard question for measuring trust in this system is whether it is superior (or not) to other (non-democratic) forms of government. And while that thermometer has cooled across America, the cooling here has been greater.
In fact, Colombia is the second country in the region where the relative number of democracy skeptics has increased the most in recent times.
It is interesting to contrast this skepticism with the more or less objective situation of freedom in the country. Colombia is not among the countries that perform best in these qualitative indices (like Canada, Uruguay or Costa Rica), but neither is it among the worst (Honduras, Haiti, Guatemala). However, unlike all other nations except Peru, skepticism about the system is much higher than the measured quality.
It seems no coincidence that two of the nations with the greatest institutional credibility problems in recent years make up this small group. Colombia, like Peru, has been in a process of declining legitimacy in relation to the prevailing democratic order for years, which can be measured, for example, by the shift in the pride of its citizens from above the regional average to below the average.
Something similar happened with the duty of support that citizens should give to the political system.
The atypical “peak” in 2018 coincides in both charts as that year saw Colombian presidential elections. The presence of elections revived confidence in the system, but in 2021 the trend turned negative again, erasing all gains.
This suggests that much of the deterioration in democratic legitimacy corresponds to a sense of unresponsiveness, sensitivity of the central electoral mechanism to citizens’ demands, interests and needs, which translates into a trend of deep discontent and not recovering on a stable path without change of government.
Will it be different this weekend, with Petros coming to power? Both his campaign and numerous analyzes from the left-banks of the ideological spectrum have foreseen that yes, the victory of the Historic Pact presupposes some sort of widening of the democratic perimeter, which will translate into policies more committed to meeting the demands to respond to those who by then were now frustrated with the system.
To do this, however, they must not only achieve the expected results in terms of decisions and implementation, but also meet the extremely high expectations that are set. And if all the democracies of the world are caught in a hyperinflation of promises resulting, among other things, from the fragmentation of the old political parties (which acted as moderators and linkers of collective interests), which forces direct dialogue with individuals, alongside the acceleration of public ones Not only is Colombia no exception to the debate, it has appointed someone as president who promises “total peace”.
When these ultimate goals seem too unattainable, a natural temptation for the new government is to stretch institutional controls under the guise of achieving them. Fits into the idea “the law is the power of those who have no power” as has been seen in other countries in the region, but also in Colombia under governments with ideological credentials, contrary to the partial dismantling of which is now occurring Rights and institutions that would present themselves as “barriers” to the advancement of the “popular will”.
Not only would that not serve to rebuild trust in democracy, it could end up destroying it completely. Two more facts suffice as a warning. First, the sense of loss of respect for their fundamental rights expressed by Colombians, suggesting they have little leeway to put them (even more) at risk.
And second, maintaining a similar base of respect for the institutions as for the rest of the continent, with deterioration actually halted at the end of the last decade.
For all these reasons, the most plausible response to Colombia’s constitutional crisis does not appear to rest solely on what an individual government is or is not doing, no matter how new or different from the previous one. But because of the way he, his opposition and his successors relate to both the institutions and the citizens themselves. Because “the law is the power of those who have no power” is a maxim that can also be clearly interpreted from a liberal, pluralistic and inclusive perspective. In the next four years we will know in which of the two interpretations falls the government that began its journey last Sunday, August 7th.
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