The third legislative year that begins this Saturday, July 20, may be the last opportunity for Gustavo Petro’s government to approve in Congress the social reforms that he promised during his campaign. To achieve this, the president appointed the liberal Juan Fernando Cristo as his new Minister of the Interior, with the mission of seeking a national agreement that will allow him to recompose the majorities lost in the Senate and preserve the weak coalition he has in the House of Representatives. However, despite the president’s desire and the good will with which the new minister of politics starts, who already held the same position in the government of former president Juan Manuel Santos, the agreement will not be easy to achieve. In the last week, a new chapter of the corruption scandal broke out in the Risk and Disaster Management Unit (UNGRD), in which several ministers of the Petro government and eight congressmen are implicated.
The scandal began in May when Sneyder Pinilla, a former UNGRD official, confessed that the government had paid millions in bribes to the president of the Senate, Iván Name, and the president of the House, Andrés Calle, to help approve the social reforms. These processes are still under investigation. This week, the Supreme Court – the court that investigates the legislators – has summoned President Petro to give his version of the events and the magistrate who is handling the case, Francisco Farfán, ordered a judicial inspection of the offices of the Presidency and the Secretariat of the Senate and the House. Its objective: “to obtain information on the process of the health reform and the pension reform.” The first version collapsed a few months ago, and Petro hopes to present a new version this year. The second was recently approved, and is now being reviewed by the Constitutional Court.
The new part of the scandal, reported this week by Caracol Newsarises from statements by the former director of UNGRD, Olmedo López, in which he accuses the Minister of Finance, Ricardo Bonilla, and other members of the cabinet, of offering contracts to six congressmen of the Public Credit Commission with the aim of approving international loans for the functioning of the State. López also claims that one of these contracts was intended to finance the ELN guerrilla in the department of Arauca.
Although there is still no conclusive evidence, this corruption scandal has gradually undermined the public’s confidence in the government and has deteriorated the relationship between the executive and the legislative. Therefore, it now seems very difficult for the government to get the independent and opposition parties to join the National Agreement that Minister Cristo is seeking. In an interview with W radio, Senator Ariel Ávila, from the Green Party, who has supported almost all of the government’s initiatives, sums up the situation well: “The minister has to go. It is unsustainable. There are two important projects related to money: the budget supplement and the new tax reform, but no senator or representative is going to vote in favor, even if they agree, because they will be afraid of being singled out.”
The opposition, led by the Democratic Center and Radical Change, has also taken advantage of the scandal to strengthen its narrative that Petro is doing the same thing he criticized previous governments for. “It is horrible and disgusting what is happening with the Risk Management Unit. We see a government that steals money to be able to give cash to congressmen to approve their reforms. In addition, they now finance terrorist groups,” wrote Senator Paloma Valencia, one of the most prominent figures of Uribeism, in X.
In the midst of this murky environment, the Government has high expectations. First, it wants to approve three major social reforms that are crucial to President Petro’s political project: labor, health, and education. In addition, in the short term, the president announced during his last visit to the UN Security Council that he will seek a fast track to speed up the implementation of the peace process with the FARC. In the long term, the president’s proposal for a national constituent assembly through the Congress of the Republic is also still valid. This would allow the 1991 Constitution to be modified to make three major reforms that have failed time and again in the Congress of the Republic: to the political system, to the structure of justice and to territorial order.
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Of the three social reforms, the labor reform is the most advanced. At the end of the previous legislature, the labor reform passed the first debate in the Seventh Commission of the Chamber and now needs three more to become law. The Government believes that it is possible for it to be approved because the Minister of Labor, Gloria Inés Ramírez, and the senators of the Historic Pact agreed, with the independent and opposition parties, to eliminate many of the articles related to the collective rights of workers so that the project would not collapse. The Government decided to give in on the expansion of strikes and the strengthening of unions in exchange for recovering overtime and Sunday surcharges, among other individual rights. The path to this reform is difficult, but viable, and the strategy of giving in on some points to reaffirm others may be the most appropriate way to achieve parliamentary majorities in the midst of the corruption scandal.
The health and education reforms are in a more complex situation. Both of them failed resoundingly at the end of the last legislature and the president spent a good part of his political capital defending them—especially the health reform, which broke the short national agreement he had in the first year of government. However, Petro has already said that starting July 20 he will insist on the two reforms through Congress. Guillermo Alfonso Jaramillo will continue in the health portfolio, but this time he seems willing to agree with the EPS on a bill that will not generate so much rejection. In conversation with EL PAÍS, the Minister of the Interior has recognized that the health reform will be one of the priorities of the semester.
The education reform will be led by Daniel Rojas, the new minister who replaced Aurora Vergara. With Rojas, Petro regains the support of the student movement and the teachers’ union, but it will be difficult for him to reach a consensus in Congress with the independent and opposition parties because he is seen as a radical left-wing activist. In his first statements, Rojas, former director of the Sociedad de Activos Especiales (SAE) and a faithful squire of Petro, has proposed that education could be the central point on which the great national agreement is built. For now, that possible harmony will be in the hands of Christ.
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