Time is running out for the social reforms of Gustavo Petro's Government. There are fewer and fewer days left for the Congress of the Republic to discuss and approve the bills that seek to fundamentally transform the health system and the pension system of millions of Colombians. These are two structural changes that would delve into the idea of transforming the country with which Petro came to the Presidency, but which for now he has not been able to achieve. In order not to sink, these two reforms must successfully complete their process before June 20, in less than three months. This week will be definitive and will mark the Government's relationship with Congress for the remainder of the legislative period. The health reform will be debated this Tuesday morning for the first time this year in the Seventh Committee of the Senate. The pension will finally face the substantive debate on the content of the project on Tuesday afternoon during the Senate plenary session. Can two of the president's most important campaign promises be saved? How are the Government's forces in the Senate? Did Petro's proposal for a constituent assembly further cloud the difficult panorama of the reforms?
A person who works as a Government liaison in Congress, and preferred not to give his name, explained to EL PAÍS that it is very difficult to revive the health reform. “If they summon her, they sink her,” she says by phone. President Petro's flagship project, which generated his first major cabinet crisis, and which has consumed a good part of his political capital, is on the brink of the abyss after eight of the 14 senators of the Seventh Commission signed a few weeks ago a presentation to archive it. The signatory senators are part of the center and right-wing parties Democratic Center, Conservative, Liberal, ASI and Just and Free Colombia. They all reconfirmed through a press release that they will not change the direction of their vote for any reason. “We will not withdraw the signatures from the negative presentation, we will not change our vote against a reform that is inconvenient and lacks clarity regarding resources, it is unsustainable.”
In this scenario, the Government has two alternatives to try to save the reform. According to a recent report on the process of the reforms made by the consulting company Vali Consultores, the first option is to modify the quorum, that is, the number of senators necessary to make a decision: “The quorum of the Commission is eight senators . This could be modified if the approval of impediments or challenges is generated.” By reducing the number of senators who can participate in the discussion, the Government could recover its majorities.
The main reason for the challenges that are being processed is the possible conflict of interest because the parliamentarians' parties received money from EPS owners during the congressional campaign in 2022. As EL PAÍS showed in a recent article, the Keralty group, owner of the EPS Sanitas, and the Bolívar group, owner of Salud Bolívar EPS, financed the congressional campaigns of these senators. For now, the decision to accept or not the challenges is in the hands of the Senate ethics commission, made up of 10 senators: Martha Peralta, Isabel Cristina Zuleta and Imelda Daza, from the Historical Pact; the conservatives Miguel Ángel Barreto and Carlos Andrés Trujillo; the liberals John Jairo Roldán and Juan Diego Echavarría; Carlos Abraham Jiménez, from Cambio Radical; Julio Elías Chagüi, from La U; Jonathan Ferney Pulido, from the Green Alliance; and Andrés Guerra Hoyos, from the Democratic Center. There, the Government does not have clear majorities, but it is not defeated either.
The second possibility of reviving the reform is through an alternative presentation, filed last week by Senator Fabián Díaz, of the Green Party and close to the Government. Díaz was the only senator on the commission who had not signed the paper that supported the reform or the one that sank it. The text of the project was criticized by some sectors that defend the current system because, according to them, it maintains the spirit of the Government reform. However, it can serve as a bridge between senators who intend to make changes to the health system in Colombia, but do not find the answer to their needs in the National Government's proposal. In this case, says Vali's report, the senators of the Government bench and those of the opposition must give in to the approaches of the new legislative proposal and be able to reach an agreement.
This Tuesday's session will be key to knowing if the impediments and challenges succeed or if the Government, through its Minister of the Interior, Luis Fernando Velasco, manages to recover some votes from the opponents. However, the reform will most likely fail. In that case, the presentation must be put to a vote and obtain 8 or more votes for it to be archived. The National Government cannot withdraw the bill on its own. It would be one of President Petro's worst political defeats. His commitment to health reform, for some, and his obsession, for others, led him to propose a National Constituent Assembly. His idea, which he later qualified, generated unanimous rejection by the Senate. Congressmen from the Democratic Center and Radical Change, from the independent benches of the Liberal, Conservative and La U parties, and even some from the Green Alliance and the Historical Pact have expressed the inconvenience, the risk and the little need for a Constituent Assembly.
The outlook for pension reform is a little more encouraging than that for health, but it does not seem easy either. Government senators maintain the hope of reaching a great agreement in the Senate plenary session, which will allow the project to continue its course in the House of Representatives, where two additional debates would await it. The first in the Seventh Commission, where Petrism can reach majorities, and the last in the plenary session, which approved the health reform last semester. Therefore, the main problem with this bill is passing the great obstacle of the plenary Senate.
In addition to winning majorities, they will have to race against time. The Minister of Labor, Gloria Inés Ramírez, recognized this last week in dialogue with the media: “We have a big problem that must be solved and it is the
tightness of times. The reform was without debate for five months.
"We are hoping that during Easter week (this) we can discuss the articles that make it possible for Colombia to have a reform that dignifies the old age of Colombians."
Ramírez does not say it, but he refers to the strategies that the opposition has used for weeks to prevent the debate: leaving the premises at the time of voting to decomplete the quorum and force the discussion to be postponed. A few days ago, Senator Paloma Valencia, of the Democratic Center, summarized her party's strategy to prevent the progress of the project: “Once again we managed to collapse the quorum to stop the discussion on the pension. Be attentive to which senators are making a quorum for the Government to pass this reform that makes the country absolutely unviable. Firm in the fight against this reform.” Valencia argues that leaving the plenary session is a legal and legitimate mechanism to avoid debate on reforms with which they do not agree. If the Government had more support, the figure would not depend on the presence of opposition congressmen. The Vali Consultores report confirms this. “Since the beginning of the legislative period, the bill has only advanced in the vote on impediments presented by senators to participate in the discussion, given that the National Government has not managed to consolidate the simple majority required to advance in the votes.”
On the agenda for this Tuesday's plenary session is a proposal from liberal senator Alejandro Chacón that seeks to create "the Accidental Pension Reform Commission among senators from all political parties to seek consensus on the technical and financial viability of the pension system." . Chacón's idea, which has not displeased the Government, would be to discuss the two reform proposals, one positive, presented by the Historical Pact and another alternative, presented by Senator Norma Hurtado of the U Party. That commission could resolve the main difference that separates both projects: the threshold level from which a quote must be made. The Petro reform proposes that all people who earn up to three minimum wages contribute to Colpensiones, while the alternative reform says that only those who earn between 1 and 1.5 minimum wages contribute to the public system.
Regardless of whether the accidental commission succeeds, the main obstacle for Petro is getting some votes from the parties that were previously part of the government coalition. If they can convince senators from the Liberal party and the U, the balance would tip in favor of the reform that seeks to give a decent income to more than two million older adults who today do not receive a pension.
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