Gustavo Petro: the ideas of a rebel

The successful third electoral campaign of Gustavo Petro does not rest solely on the results of the polls.

If in 2010, at 50 years old, he came in fourth place with 1,375,000 votes and in 2018 he managed to obtain the coquettish sum of more than eight million in the second round, in 2022 his deployment has gone beyond the borders of Colombia .

In addition to his meetings with the people in the public square, intense communication on social networks, the opening of a channel on Spotify, the publication of his program

and the launch

a documentary about his life.

At the international level, his meetings with former President Felipe González, the head of the Spanish Government Pedro Sánchez, the President of Chile Gabriel Boric and with Pope Francis draw a statesman entering the Casa de Nariño.

These stops along the way allow him to distance himself from the dictatorial leftist regimes of Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua.

As in any electoral contest, errors have not been absent.

Petro, scrutinized by his opponents at every slightest gesture, has made countless slips.

A laconic statement in the face of the drama that Ukraine is experiencing;

on the end of oil exploration and not exploitation contracts as a response to the urgent energy transition, and the use of the "social forgiveness" of the philosopher Jacques Derrida to develop "a process of historical truth" are just a few events that have unleashed strong criticism of their positions.

Despite this, a few days before the first round, he maintains a frenetic campaign and multiplies his meetings with the people and the media.

His leadership has been erected in a robust political career that began within the M-19 guerrillas.

His dismissal as mayor of Bogotá marks the beginning towards the first magistracy.

On the night of December 10, 2013, he reveals it: “I want you to be aware that we are beginning to live days of history.

This is not just another demonstration… it is the longing for peace, for democracy, for the freedom of our people.

Perhaps due to the vicissitudes of history itself, a humble boy decided to read books and find words of rebellion there and then rise up against what he considered unfair”.

Reading authors such as Jean Jacques Rousseau, Michel Foucault, Karl Marx and Gabriel García Márquez, among many others, from a very young age, sustains his critical sense.

From Rousseau he took the social contract, that programmatic agreement that allows the coexistence of society and that in 2020 he baptized as the Historical Pact.

De Foucault appropriates the "change of power".

His project calls for the existence of "new social relations of production and consumption, new cultures and symbols tied to life, knowledge and freedom."

With

, he discerns the concept of a post-capitalist society of high productivity and abundance, where wealth becomes the free time of citizens.

His proposals seek to generate a regulation of consumption and a philosophy of life based more on existing than on having.

García Márquez allows him to set his story;

magical realism and

enrich his speeches: “Vote for Change, vote for Petro, vote for the possibility, as García Márquez said, not that we don't have a second chance under the skies of the planet, condemned like the Aurelians , but on the contrary we have a second chance”.

His thought is a cry of freedom before a dominant and exclusive elite entrenched in power.

Gustavo Petro does not hide his weapons to captivate the audience: "My grace in the Colombian electoral debates of recent years has been to bring complex theoretical discussions to popular power."

Petrista thought exposes its main concerns.

His vision is broad and there is no speech without a call to national and world history, to humanity, to the need to create a transition to peace, to greater justice and to the transformation of politics.

Covid-19, displacement, the energy transition, the strengthening of an agrarian, agro-industrial economy, and the strengthening of industrialization constitute the main axes of his interventions.

His proposals qualified as radical left have a foothold in the global discussion about caring for the planet, in the Glasgow reports where it has been requested not to exceed the 1.5 degrees Celsius average temperature increase.

This implies, in Petro's opinion, that 80% of Colombian coal must remain in the subsoil: "That is not a message from me, it is a message from science," he argues.

What has been the common denominator of your meetings in the public square?

A speech that evokes a critical sense by exposing the main roots of the Colombian conflict, a hope for the excluded under the proposal to create a collective project and a vision of the future based on a society that holds power and that leads a pact of coexistence.

Petrism goes beyond political mechanics, its ideas seek a change in the mentality of citizens: "the transition to less mercantile forms of the intensity of life, going more to art, culture, sensations, more to know, more to knowledge, more to live fully and to offer what each person would like to do”.

If Gustavo Petro wins the presidency,

, Colombia will live like the Gallic country on May 10, 1981 when the socialist François Mitterrand burst onto the French political scene.

And Colombia will come of age, debuting for the first time the concept of political alternation in its republican history.

Maria Fernanda González Binetti

teaches political communication at the Institute of Sciences Po France and at the Camilo José Cela University in Madrid, Spain. 

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