Petro must be taken seriously, and in this public opinion makes a mistake when it indicates that Petro “knows” that he will not be able to approve in Congress a law convening a National Constituent Assembly.
Of course he knows it.
But that is not what he is saying: it is not what he first said in Cali and it is not what he clarified in his interview in
El Tiempo.
A quick reading of the movement itself that supports it – Pastor Saade, Bolívar, some
especially faithful
influencers – also pointed out another channel.
What Petro is proposing is an extra-constitutional constituent process.
Extraconstitutional constituent processes are those that are not subject to prior constitutional rules for their conduct.
Examples are the process that gave rise to the French Revolution, the development of the Constitution of the United States and, according to some followers of Petro, the 1991 Constitution itself.
The 1991 Constituent Assembly was not extraconstitutional.
It required two decrees of legislative content from the President of the Republic, two favorable rulings from the Supreme Court of Justice, a favorable opinion from the then National Registrar and three elections.
Petro is suggesting that some popular committees, of no one knows who or when or how, be accepted as the constituent power, something like if the opposition filled some community halls and said that the constituent power has decided to dismiss Petro.
No meeting of the people is the constituent power.
Let's go in parts.
What is the town?
The people are fifty-two million Colombians.
Not one less.
What is constituent power?
The constituent power is the part of the people authorized to reform the Constitution, that is, the people when they vote in a referendum or when they are represented by a National Constituent Assembly.
What is a popular committee, a town hall or a packed Plaza de Bolívar?
It is a part – very small, too – of the people, which is therefore not authorized to reform the Constitution, since, if it were allowed, this would exclude the majority of the people.
This whole mess also arises from several misreadings by Petro himself.
About the change
Petro thinks that he champions a process of unprecedented social change in Colombia.
This idea is stimulated by historically weak founding myths, such as theirs being the first left-wing government.
Petro is not the first left-wing president in Colombia and Petro, rather, was chosen by the pandemic, not by his political skill, although it is great;
Nor was he chosen by a budding social change: he was chosen by the pandemic, in the same way that the pandemic chose the party that represented the opposition in almost the entire continent.
Without the pandemic, Petro would never have been president.
The “National Strike”, renamed by the left itself as “Social Outbreak”—the left imported this term from Chile;
“lawfare”, another concept that is also already used to designate adverse judicial decisions, comes from Kirchnerism in Argentina, was interpreted as a social change of large proportions rather than as the cry of protest of a people consumed by the pandemic and confinement. , fueled by Petro and inflamed by police repression and Duque's weightless government.
Now Petro has to do something with that story that doesn't exist, and the only thing is to create it.
Petro seems out of place every time his own narrative of change is broken, as in his balcony speeches, in which the listeners are his own officials, and in his marches of officials and unions.
He is overcome with sadness, as in
The Emperor's New Clothes
.
About the town
Petro also has difficulty recognizing the fragmentation of the people and the system of plural legitimacy that is characteristic of democratic systems.
The people do not elect the president to do everything they want.
That would be another system.
The people elect him so that, together with other actors that he also elects, and even others that he does not elect, he adopts major decisions, such as laws, constitutional reforms and public policies.
The people decided that the mandate to make laws would be fulfilled by a group of actors: the Legislature that discusses and approves them, the Executive that presents and defends them, and the Constitutional Court that decides whether or not they are contrary to the Constitution. .
The people elected the Congress that legitimately decides not to approve Petro's reforms.
The popularly elected Congress appoints a good part of the authorities that control Petro.
The people established in the Constitution freedom of expression that authorizes multiple voices to show their disagreement with the government.
The people voted for the Constituent Assembly and support the Constitution after thirty years.
Not only that.
The M-19 was one of the parties that he presided over and that won the most in the Constituent Assembly.
About the opposition
Petro has problems recognizing legitimacy on the political spectrum.
Everything that is to the right of him is recast by him as “extreme” right, if not “fascism.”
The political offer is reduced to the democratic left and fascism.
Like Trump, Petro has the habit of repeating political messages when he sees that they resonate.
The most powerful is the life versus death dichotomy.
Since nothing is worse than death, Petro can be corrupt, inefficient and populist and, even so, he will be preferable to his rivals, who are all of these things, but also "murderers."
This criminalization of the opposition is one of his most notorious anti-democratic traits.
About his popularity
Usually this type of process is promoted by popular presidents.
The unusual thing is that Petro is not popular.
The extravagant thing about all this is that the people are not with Petro.
Nor are politicians his enemies;
Petro has a more powerful enemy: the “sovereign”, as he calls him: it is the people who do not support him.
Petro accuses politicians;
What happens is that politicians smell blood.
It is beginning to be seen that the Historical Pact will not be able to win the elections in 2026 (if they are held), nor will it be able to obtain the 20 senators it has today.
This will leave many out, as the local failure already left them: a candidate from the center defeated Petro's second, in Bogotá, his own political house.
But the left has already tasted (and savored) the previously forbidden fruits of power;
You already know the contracts and the travel expenses, the vans and the embassies, and all the unjustified and unfair delights that the disproportionate use of political power in Colombia brings.
They did not fight against it.
Not a single privilege has disappeared or will disappear in this four-year period.
The entire center that supported him, sometimes with embarrassing optimism, is now gone.
Defending Petro has gone in these first two years from being politically correct to requiring a little courage, and a little shame.
The accounts are different.
20% of the Colombian people voted for Petro in the first round.
In the second, 30%, and he almost lost against the worst candidate in the history of Colombia, an alternative little short of lunatic.
Any other minimally competent candidate would have defeated him.
The left was successful in preventing that candidate from reaching the second round.
Petro has not achieved a single massive demonstration, nothing like the millions of Colombians who took to the streets against the FARC in the first decade of the century.
In no survey, not even his, does Petro exceed 50% popularity.
What town is he talking about?
The illuminated town
Petro speaks of the “enlightened” people.
Petro is receptive to the Marxist theory that when the people do not believe in these theses, it is because they are alienated and must be "awakened."
The recent messages against the media fulfill this function.
The people have been “idiotized”, he said it with those exact words a week ago.
Accusing the people, as Petro has done several times, in a way that should cause rejection to a democrat, produces on the left the satisfaction that comes with that sense of superiority over knowledge that Petro invokes.
It is, at its core, an elitist claim, as recalcitrant as that of the technocracy they question.
And the right?
The Uribista right, which, that is to say, is not the only right, has little it can say about this.
Uribe was re-elected and wanted to do it a second time.
Uribe caused as much institutional unrest as Petro.
The mobilization against Petro's authoritarian drift cannot come from Uribismo.
It must come from a broader platform that includes all Democrats.
Felipe Rey Salamanca
is a professor at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, he received his doctorate from the Pompeu Fabra University and was a visiting researcher at Princeton University.
He is the author of
The Representative System.
Political representations and the transformation of parliamentary democracy
, published in 2023 by Gedisa.
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