Former Vice President Vargas Lleras becomes a key ally of Duke in Colombia

An old acquaintance of Colombian politics has returned to the front line. Germán Vargas Lleras (Bogotá, 1962), the powerful vice president of Juan Manuel Santos whom many took for granted after his failed aspiration to reach Casa de Nariño in 2018, has resurfaced as an unexpected support of President Iván Duque at a critical moment , when the president is going through a deep crisis of popularity. Without formal charge, the leader of the Radical Change party prepares to prove for the umpteenth time that he is a survivor of life and politics.

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• Duke touches his Cabinet as an opening gesture to other parties
• The president of Colombia is enrolled in uribismo to relaunch his Government

Duke, who ended December besieged by protests and opinion polls, has had a truce at the beginning of this year. A dropper, he has completed the long-awaited remodeling of his Cabinet so far in 2020. Although it maintained the main ministries in the orbit of the Democratic Center, the government party founded by its political mentor, former president Álvaro Uribe, finished off those tweaks with an opening gesture to three other parties. The conservatives were left with the portfolio of Agriculture, the Party of the U with that of Labor and Radical Change with that of Health, which will bear the seal of Vargas Lleras.

Of those three groups, the first two were nominally considered from the beginning government parties within the new rules of the Statute of opposition, but Radical Change had declared itself independent. Hence, his landing in the Cabinet has been the greatest novelty of the ministerial shake. It is even anticipated that, under the baton of Vargas Lleras, he prepares to formally declare himself as a government party when Congress meets again, starting in mid-March.

The new Minister of Health, Fernando Ruiz Gómez, is a surgeon with a technical profile who has been a consultant to the World Bank. In addition to his membership in Radical Change, he is very close to Vargas Lleras and was the author of the sector chapter on his presidential platform. The appointment can raise suspicions in the Democratic Center, since Ruiz Gómez was vice minister and Vargas Lleras vice president during Santos' term, of which Duque - and with greater vehemence the most radical uribism - has shown himself as a critical iron.

Duke (center) next to Vargas Lleras during the inauguration of the Pumarejo Bridge, in December. Presidency of Colombia

In any case, the name of Ruiz Gómez was also perceived as a coup of authority of the former vice president within his party. Vargas Lleras is what in Colombia is usually called the natural head of Radical Change, but has had to compete for internal leadership with the Char house, as the family of the popular mayor of Barranquilla Alejandro Char is called.

With the nascent coalition, the reforms to health or justice with which Vargas Lleras campaigned will be welcomed in the new legislative agenda of an Executive that until now had lacked majorities. The 16 senators and 40 representatives of Radical Change seem like the faithful of the balance for any project proposed by the Government in Congress, especially those that deal with sensitive issues such as pensions or labor issues.

The survivor

For years one of the most guarded men in Colombia, the scars that Vargas Lleras carries on his shoulders are evident. Grandson of the liberal president Carlos Lleras Restrepo (1966-1970), he has tanned in the political arena since he was very young and is closely linked to the Colombian establishment. He began his career at the hands of the liberal leader Luis Carlos Galán, murdered in 1989, and positioned himself as a tough-handed politician with his fierce criticism from Congress to the peace negotiation of El Caguán, the failed effort of Andrés Pastrana (1998 -2002) for reaching an agreement with the FARC. On the way he survived two bomb attacks, one of which cost him two fingers of his left hand.

During Santos' first term he was Minister of the Interior and Housing, and in the second, already in the vice presidency, he overcame a benign brain tumor, detected after it collapsed on a platform. Apart from the dialogues of Havana, with which he marked distance at various times, he inaugurated infrastructure and was the visible face when delivering 100,000 free houses to the most vulnerable social bands. That role should have paved the way to Casa de Nariño. In fact, Vargas Lleras started the campaign for the 2018 major elections as a wide favorite.

Despite coming from the Santos Government, he decided to contrast his service sheets and compete with the inexperienced Duke for the conservative vote. "The presidency cannot be learned," he snapped. He came to invoke the need to stop the radical left, with the expectation of also bringing together the center electors in a second round to which he never qualified. But he lost loudly. With less than a million and a half votes, he was fourth in the first round, behind Duque, of the left-wing ex-mayor of Bogotá Gustavo Petro - who disputed the second round - and even of the former Medellin mayor Sergio Fajardo.

Since then, Vargas Lleras had shown himself as one of Duque's greatest contradictors until recently, and had whipped the Government from his column in the newspaper El Tiempo. The first obvious approaches began in December, when Cambio Radical backed the controversial tax reform of Duque in Congress, one of the protesters' big claims amid the wave of protests against the president that at that time shook the country. It was also during those days when the inauguration of the Pumarejo Bridge, on the Magdalena River, brought together Duke, Char and Vargas Lleras, who posed smiling for an unpublished photo. A new and unexpected postcard of Colombian politics.