The so -called change of change reaches the third of its four years without fulfilling that promise to take Colombia to a new and better reality, although it has not led to the South American country to the debacle predicted that the right -wing opponents predicted. With a resisted reform agenda that leaves some legacies, a security that worsens while the commitment to negotiate peace leaves Procos Frutos, and, Gustavo Petro faces his last year as president of a country that had been decades without choosing a left -wing president. It does, with a stable support of its bases that are around the third of the electorate and without giving an apex in a speech and confusing times, with which he has managed to handle the art of putting the public agenda but has also reinforced uncertainty.
The two months prior to commemoration have been full of events that have shaken the country. At the beginning of June, the presidential opposition senator and candidate for which he remains in intensive care. At the end of the same month, this newspaper, Trump’s complicity sought in the United States to knock down the president, fruitlessly. And already closing Julio, a judicial case against former right -wing president Álvaro Uribe Vélez, for bribery to judicial witnesses, was sealed in the first instance with. That recover of first -order political events, although of different kinds, marks the tense political environment of an anniversary that also usually be a starting gun for the electoral campaign in a country recognized for its predictable political rhythms, which in the last 120 years has chosen at the polls all its presidents, with only an exception in the decade of the 50.
Precisely, an electoral campaign that adds half a hundred applicants in a huge reinforce the lack of certainty that has marked these three years of Petro, with changing priorities and government equipment, and mixed results. Governing has been difficult for a left accustomed to being an opposition and that came to power after great social movements against Uribista president Iván Duque. The multiple ballasts include the difficulties that Petro has accepted in carrying out his projects – and of which he has blamed his ministers, in one of the multiple public interventions that put the media and the country to speak -, his decision on the work improvements, the intestines in a constant change in constant change or the judicial scandals that have reached the presidential family, several ministers and the heart of the house of Nariño. In addition, it has affected having subject the security policy to an ambitious but failed simultaneous negotiation strategy with all armed groups, the total peace of which only negotiations with dissidents of local scope are left. All this seasoned by an omnipresent presidential speech, increasingly on, and that includes between long disquisitions in a tone that oscillates between the quarrelsome and the lyrical.
With all this, the popular support that became a majority in 2022 no longer remains at those levels. The surveys indicate a presidential approval that is around 30% and the local elections of October 2023 were a clear sign that progressivism is far from achieving hegemony: the left had bad results in Bogotá, which Petro ruled; Cali, where he devastated the presidential ones; or Medellín, a city that demonstrated again to be a bastion of the right. The victories, however, are not all of the same sector or political shore, and the various nuances of the center and the right do not reach the legislative majority or a popular majority support. Politics remains in the field of lack of clarities.
In fact, current mayors and governors have been occupying the space of an achephal and disoriented opposition, which faces the conviction of their main reference in the last 25 years and the reality that Colombia has not followed the apocalypse that they warned during the 2022 campaign. Uribism and then said that Colombia would continue the path of Venezuela, the country impoverished and governed by an anti -mocratic regime that for decades he had been the neighbor envied for his standard of living and the fate of millions of Colombian migrants. But Colombia has not arrived Castrochavism. Private property has not been affected, Petro has not changed the Constitution to re -elected, institutional counterweights are maintained. With legislative defeats as the refusal to health reform; Courts that have annulled appointments, decrees or laws; And a central bank that maintains the executive, the politician who dreamed with a rapid change of social and economic structures has been encountered again and again with the limits to presidential power. “I failed to believe that I could make a revolution ruling,” he said in an interview with El País last February, when a year and a half of the end of his mandate he was already resigned.
That does not mean, however, that there is no progress. In a flattering first semester of government, with a coalition with the moderate ones, Petro took forward a very ambitious tax reform, which has expanded the collection; Later, and with more difficulties, he could change the entire pension scheme so that retirement reaches more people and make adjustments to the legislation to work on Sundays, holidays or night schedules. Poverty, measured by health, education and housing conditions, has fallen from 27.3% in 2022 to 24.3% in 2024; If measured by income, it fell from 34.6% to 31.8% of Colombians, the lowest figure in 12 years.
With all that, the president can already claim a legacy, even if he is much lower than his ambition and his campaign promise. But it is not clear that it is sufficient so that in next year the left maintain power and grows in the legislative. Uncertainty is also electoral.
