Although when the names of the presidential candidates began to appear, the panorama for Colombia showed a series of figures who promised to enrich the democratic debate, today many have become blurred, others are not able to connect with the audiences and almost everyone else they get lost in discussions of electoral mechanics.
The temptations to divide, even in parties that like Green seemed very cohesive, are the order of the day. The possibility of choosing a single name so that the center can confront a Gustavo Petro from the more radical left, which is growing or sustaining itself, and a right that for now appears speaking to Colombia from Miami, where they held their last debate, raises a gloomy scenery.
Neither is different. And they do not do it because there are no proposals on the great issues of the country, much less on a true model of the nation beyond the common places. Faced with territorial conjunctures, the well-known needs of the state presence are repeated without finding the answers to how. In general, they are heard in some forums talking about economic democracy, justice, respect for rights. Faced with environmental problems, the difficulties of the extractivist and educational model, the growing crimes, no candidate raises the idea of the Colombia that he imagines to govern.
The events of the last week show the same pragmatism of Gustavo Petro, better his political opportunism, with the repeated arrival of the Christians to his Historical Pact, as well as before he received the clientelists and the provocative speech of the expropriation of land; Alejandro Gaviria seeks a center coalition beyond the Hope coalition, where he has not been welcomed because he refuses to accept conditions such as rejecting the Liberal Party. Meanwhile, Sergio Fajardo rebounds in the polls second behind Petro and the candidates who collect signatures, such as Federico Gutiérrez and Enrique Peñalosa, receive the invitation of Juan Carlos Echeverry who summons them to a new coalition, but no longer of hope but of experts. A circle of back and forth and empty proposals that say nothing to the potential voter.
A perhaps clearer coalition seems to be making its way in the center right with the previous play and the Conservative Party’s commitment to Senator David Barguil, perhaps in an attitude that should be welcomed. I imagine a scenario in which a change begins to be forged from within the parties in the face of the cracking of their credibility.
Liberals and others must begin by choosing candidates for the next congressional elections from their lists without blemish or investigation. Humberto de la Calle has already accepted to head the list of the Coalition of Hope, setting the bar high for the other parties. The U went for the Olympic medalist Catherine Ibarguen in search of a makeover that the head of the community, Dilian Francisca Toro, knows she needs, but that it will not be enough if she does not refine the complete list.
The Democratic Center is left without its leader for the parliamentarians. Álvaro Uribe takes a step to the side, leaving his orphans and in search of a new figure, hopefully young, as Miguel Uribe and Paloma Valencia seem to be.
The clear thing is that the campaign is stagnant, the movements of each day show the temptation for personalism, but not those of the current to put citizens at the center but rather those of self-interest, in the cult of personality. in which neither yields to the other in function of the others. And in the meantime, old organizations such as Oxygen Verde, by Ingrid Betancourt, and Salvación Nacional, now headed by the conservative Enrique Gómez, seek to regain their legal status as the New Liberalism at the head of Juan Manuel Galán has already done. These days she is the beauty of the party, which I hope they will not damage.
In this quest to revive movements, I do not find anything different from recovering legal platforms to increase opinion politics and guarantee entry to coalitions that end up cooking and without any content, argumentation, or politics of the great, which is what that would be expected in this and any other country that has gone through the dark times of the pandemic, where inequality gaps have deepened and a future look is required with some certainties.
For now, Petro seeks to break his ceiling, in the political center atomization and personalities prevent agreements, the center right is strengthened and the old political movements are seeking to be retreaded in the courts. The hope of a congressional list with respectable figures made its way with the election of Humberto de la Calle, but it would have to be a very naive one to think that the machinery did not start to get oiled and the pockets to fill like every four years.
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