Petro calls on Christ to mix pragmatism with his constituent dream

Gustavo Petro’s patience ran out three months ago. His advisers saw him furious, sometimes angry. Rarely for him, who tends to remain calm. However, the slowness with which changes are being implemented in Colombia, the halt to the transformations that he believes are needed, drove him to despair. It was then that he decided to talk about calling a Constituent Assembly, even if that meant frightening the Colombian centre and right, who see constitutional reform as a danger to democracy. It was then a Petro who rode alone, he against the world. Critical voices arose in his entourage. They thought it was better to seek a national agreement, which he had tried to square at the beginning of his presidency, a consensus on the right and left that would lay the foundations of the country for the coming decades. Something really big and lasting, which in the long run would be seen as a success of his presidency.

The president has listened to this advice, but he is going to mix it with his own ideas. An attempt will be made to reach a national agreement, that is fine, but so that it ends up leading to a Constituent Assembly. This can be read as a way for Petro to back down and at the same time stay on the same path. A balancing act that has baffled many, especially because of the person to whom he has entrusted this task, Juan Fernando Cristo, Minister of the Interior under Juan Manuel Santos and negotiator in the Havana peace process. A heavyweight politician who had been left somewhat behind after campaigning in 2022 for the centre, which ended up being resoundingly defeated by Petro. The president is now bringing him back and appointing him to the same position that Santos gave him, although with a very different task.

Cristo, 58, has a reputation as a great political operator, a maker of consensus. The phone numbers of the most powerful people in the country are stored in his address book. He is not only close to Santos, but also his friend, in a true sense. His appointment was well received by the establishmentwho interpreted this as a gesture of moderation by Petro. They thought that it was a return to the first months of the mandate, when the president surrounded himself with Alejandro Gaviria, Cecilia López and José Antonio Ocampo, all of them experienced, moderate, centrist politicians. They were wrong. Cristo appeared hours later and announced that he would work to move forward with the dialogue for the constituent assembly, although for 2026; that means that it would begin with the mandate of the next president. Those who celebrated the inclusion of Cristo in the Government backed off and began to suspect him.

Essentially because he had uttered three words that politicians, analysts and many voters feared: National Constituent Assembly. The fear that Petro would call for something like this has been such that, when he was a presidential candidate in 2018, his allies asked him to put it in stone that he would not call for such an assembly to reform the young Constitution of 1991. Petro agreed, and did not publicly toy with the idea again until this year, when his health reform fell through: there he suggested that, perhaps, it was time to change the national text. The proposal did not go down well, even among some of his allies, but now, before starting his third year of government, the president sends another message: Assembly yes, but not by force. “An assembly that is the result of an agreement and not of the imposition of someone against someone. This country needs more reforms, but consensual reforms,” promised Minister Cristo this Wednesday, in his first press conference.

Next week, Cristo announced, a national dialogue will begin that eventually “may or may not, and that will emerge from the conversations, end in a Constituent Assembly.” He clarified that this possible assembly would not be convened or elected under the current Government, but under the next one, and only if there is a “national political agreement.” And he clarified that, in any case, this assembly would prosper only “through the channels of the 1991 Constitution.” With Cristo, Petro’s solitary adventure already has a channel, method, direction. Before this turn, the president spoke of a cascade of constituents in social and university sectors that would lead to one that would collect all these concerns and be approved without the need to go through Congress, but directly at the polls. Many jurists concluded that this idea had no legal basis and would be revoked sooner or later. Petro returned to the fray and, guided by former foreign minister Álvaro Leyva, said that he would use the 2016 peace agreement to convene said constituent assembly.

Among those who thought it was a bad idea was Cristo himself. Together with Santos and Senator Humberto de la Calle, also a peace negotiator in that same government, he rejected Petro’s use of the agreement signed with the FARC. Now the time has come for him to defend this process, although by different methods. Cristo is not naive: he knows well how difficult it is to make the idea prosper through constitutional means. The president has to process the initiative in the Legislature (where he is not guaranteed half of the votes), then it must go through the Constitutional Court (where it can fail), and finally he must count on 13 million Colombians voting for the initiative (mobilizing more people than voted for him in the second round). That sounds impossible when the president’s approval rating remains around 38%. In addition, 61% of Colombians do not support the Constituent Assembly, according to the latest Cifras y Conceptos survey.

Cristo is a seasoned politician in the legislature, he was a senator and Minister of the Interior, he knows the small politics that the Government needs in the Senate and the House of Representatives to get its social reforms approved: the labor reform (there are three debates left), and the president hopes to introduce new ones in health, education, public services and justice. There is a lot of work to do. There, the new Minister of the Interior does not depend on 13 million votes but on many fewer, and due to his profile he can get the support of liberals, conservatives and members of the U party. Getting the changes through the legislature, paradoxically, takes away power from the initiative of the constituent assembly. Why reform the constitutional text if the same congress can promote the change? Cristo can play both sides: call for dialogue for an improbable constituent assembly, while approving the reforms that show why a constituent assembly is not needed.

In any case, it will not be easy for him to navigate the constituent lexicon of the president, who sometimes says that he no longer wants an assembly, but to strengthen “the constituent power,” and at other times has spoken of a “constitutional referendum.” Nor will he reassure the more centrist liberals, who immediately criticized the initiative. “What credibility can a person have who changes his mind so drastically in two months?” columnist Daniel Samper Ospina immediately asked in X.

Alejandro Gaviria, a former education minister who has radically distanced himself from Petro and has launched an ongoing campaign against him, commented that “the idea of ​​the Constituent Assembly do
es not suit the country.” “It will lead to even greater political confrontation and confuse priorities. Democracy will suffer and many of the country’s main problems will continue to be neglected,” he added. Claudia López, a former mayor of Bogotá who wants to run for president in 2026, defended the current text: “Yesterday, today, tomorrow and always we will firmly defend the Constitution of 1991, the only real agreement that Colombia has!”

Petro has once again unsettled allies and enemies. He extends a hand to dialogue, but with the same aim of reforming the Constitution. He embraces the politicians who surrounded Santos, the same ones who were criticizing him just a few days before. It is known that political feelings in Colombia can change like hurricane categories, from one moment to the next. Thus, two years are opening in which the president will try to push as much as he can to achieve the change he dreams of, the historic watershed. Juan Fernando Cristo will play a fundamental role. The national agreement awaits them.

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