The electoral blow of last Sunday, when he went from calculating a first-round victory to a second place in the runoff, buried, at least for now, one of the banners of Petro’s presidential campaign: the polarizing proposal of a national constituent assembly promoted by the Casa de Nariño and supported by the Historical Pact candidate.
Behind this move is the purpose of trying to bring the political center closer, which, like other political sectors, viewed with alarm the intention of the Government and its candidate to open the door to a major overhaul of the ’91 charter, with all the risks that this implies.
This Thursday, President Gustavo Petro confirmed that the promoting committee he himself pushed for suspends its work, and that it does so due to the new political reality: “The electoral decision reflected in the last elections, by reflecting (sic) a deep citizen division, does not allow the constituent to convene itself,” he wrote yesterday on his X account.
Presidential candidate Iván Cepeda “thanked” yesterday for the suspension of the process and assured that his banner is a national agreement, although at no time did he clearly establish that in an eventual government of his, the ghost of the constituent assembly would not be revived. While the Historical Pact campaign assures that this possibility is buried, doubts persist. While the candidate stated yesterday that the collection of signatures that would endorse the constituent assembly to take it to Congress “concluded,” Petro used another term: “suspended.”
In his tweet, the head of state says that it is necessary to wait for “the next government” to be defined in order to resume the agenda of his “social reforms,” whose deepening, he affirms, was supposedly the reason why he promoted the constituent assembly.
With the main leaders of the political center –Sergio Fajardo, Juan Daniel Oviedo, and Claudia López herself– expressly against the idea of reforming the ’91 charter, it is vital for Cepeda to distance himself from the project that Gustavo Petro defended for more than two years. A purpose in which the numerous allusions to the constituent assembly and “constituent power” that appear in several parts of the government plan do not help him much.
Thus, by promoting his ‘national agreement,’ Cepeda’s roadmap mentions “one or several implementation mechanisms for the agreements, which can be a national constituent assembly or laws and constitutional reforms that we adopt through an expedited route.” In fact, the second point of that plan is titled ‘The national agreement supported by constituent power.’
That contradiction did not go unnoticed. “The President agrees to ‘suspend the signature collection process’.” “Between that and definitively renouncing a constituent assembly, there is a gap,” said analyst Thierry Ways. Several sectors also recalled the unfulfilled promise of 2018 by then-candidate Petro, which was supposedly set in stone and which the current president tried to break throughout his entire term, without success.
The need to remove the constituent assembly issue from the public spotlight began to gain strength last Sunday, May 31, when the Historical Pact received electoral results that were not within its internal calculations. In addition to promoting, above the norms that prevent political participation, the campaign of his Historical Pact heir, Petro was betting on laying the foundations of a constituent assembly of which he hoped to be a protagonist and, possibly, a beneficiary with a potential return of the figure of presidential re-election.
Yesterday, former minister Juan Fernando Cristo, who is precisely designated to establish dialogues with the center, declared the constituent assembly issue overcome. “Iván Cepeda and we, the center sectors, had insisted again and again that the path the country has is that of a national agreement. Cepeda, in the agreements he made with En Marcha and the Green Alliance, indicated that the path would be an agreement to process the reforms through Congress. We must celebrate that it was understood in good time that a constituent assembly is inconvenient,” said Cristo in an interview with this newspaper.
However, in both interviews and campaign speeches, Cepeda always left the door open for an eventual constituent assembly, according to him, in case his ‘national agreement’ did not prosper. “It may be that at the end of that path, not at the beginning, but at the end, we agree that there are some agreed-upon issues and then comes the matter of how it is implemented, as in any agreement. So, to implement them, they must be incorporated into the Constitution and the legal order.”
The political cost, however, had been steadily rising and skyrocketed after Sunday’s defeat. Therefore, according to several sources, the campaign would have started dialogues with President Petro and the constituent promoting committee to put a pause to this process and withdraw the request from the National Registry. This, apparently, generated discomfort in the most radical wing. It should be remembered that among the signatures supporting the project were those of Petro and the Ministers of Interior, Armando Benedetti, and Labor, Antonio Sanguino. Even last May 1st, a ‘plazoletazo’ was held in Medellín, led by the president, to promote a ‘signature drive’ and a bank account was opened to support it financially.
Today, that entire narrative changes so that Cepeda can increase his chances of ‘fishing’ for center votes. The doubt now is how much they believe that supposed no to the constituent assembly. “The fundamental problem is credibility. When a proposal has been an ideological banner for years and is withdrawn months before an election, center voters have legitimate reasons to read it as an an electoral tactic and not as a decision,” says María Lucía Jaimes, from the Externado network of political scientists.
Cepeda’s campaign, which bet on hardening and radicalization for months, now seeks to refresh its image and move from the narrative of institutional blockade to one in which he is shown as a firm defender of institutionality.
“The center right now is like the five cents missing from the peso. But it will not vote for a candidate who could put the institutional order at risk,” affirms analyst Alejandro Chala.
In that sense, Cepeda faces an enormous challenge, because both in the controversial decision to not recognize the results of Sunday’s electoral pre-count –unprecedented and without any real justification, as the scrutiny results showed– and in his very position yesterday regarding the Constituent Assembly, he continues, according to analysts, to follow the steps already defined by the President.
LAURA CATALINA PERALTA GIRALDO
Political Desk