The death of Petro's political reform
The Petro government was forced to withdraw its political reform from Congress. Here's the story of how this reform turned into an unsalvageable mess.
In September 2022, the new Petro administration presented its political reform proposal. It partially translated Petro’s campaign promises and officially intended to ‘democratize’ the country. In March 2023, the government was forced to withdraw the political reform from Congress, political support for it having evaporated amidst controversies and fights over its content. It was a major political defeat and humiliation for the government, its first major legislative failure.
As a constitutional reform, it completed the first four of eight debates in December 2022 (two debates in each house), and needed to be approved again in another round of four debates during the current congressional session.
The art of defacing political reforms
Political reforms are a difficult beasts, because they directly affect the things that congressmen care most about: their interests and political future. As a result, passing a significant political reform is difficult and there’s always a big risk that it turns into a ‘Christmas tree’. The last major political reform was adopted in 2015. Juan Manuel Santos failed to pass the political reform stipulated by the 2016 peace agreement in 2017–18, and Iván Duque failed to pass his political reform in the first year of his term.
In December 2022, at the end of the last congressional session, the House and Senate agreed on a conciliated text, available here. This text would serve as the basis for the second round of debates this year.
The heart of the reform were closed lists and public campaign financing.
Under the reform, all parties and movements would be required to run closed lists, with gender parity and a zipper/zebra system (alternating male and female candidates). Currently, parties may run either closed or open lists and there are no requirements for gender parity besides a legal requirement that at least 30% of candidates on lists in constituencies electing five or more members be women.
The Pacto Histórico ran a closed list with alternating male and female candidates in 2022, and has become the main advocate for closed lists — arguing that closed lists will strengthen political parties, increase women’s representation, simplify the electoral process, reduce the risks of corruption and reduce clientelism.
The debate around mandatory closed lists isn’t new. Since 2014, there have been 16 failed attempts to legislate closed lists. Duque’s 2018 political reform mandated closed lists and the expert commission on electoral reform, created by the peace agreement, also recommended closed lists in its 2017 report.
Nevertheless, closed lists are still very controversial, not least because most congressmen were elected from open lists. Opponents of closed lists usually say that they would impose the ‘dictatorship of the pen’ (dictadura del bolígrafo) — that the party leader would arbitrarily impose their list, rewarding loyalists and punishing critics.
The reform stated that the selection of candidates would be done through ‘internal democratic mechanisms’, left undefined. Elsewhere in the text, it is said that parties and movements would be required to choose their candidates and leadership through internal democratic mechanisms — including internal or inter-party primaries (consultas populares) or ‘any other’ democratic mechanism including ‘consensus’. The confusingly worded text implies that such primaries would be closed (i.e. limited to party members) and the electoral bodies would be required to manage a record of party members — something much easier said than done in Colombia. Transitional paragraphs would give parties one year to modify their statutes to include internal democratic mechanisms, and the government three months to present a statutory law to regulate intra-party democracy.
Regional caciques and gamonales, elected thanks to their ‘machine votes’ and often with rather tenuous partisan loyalties or ideological convictions, usually tend to oppose closed lists — hiding behind the arguments of ‘independence’, ‘personal links to their voters’ or refusal of the dictadura del bolígrafo. In this Congress, they found an unlikely ally: the new cohort of ‘influencer’ congressmen, led by the YouTuber senator ‘Jota Pe’ Hernández (Green). Jota Pe was one of the big surprises of the 2022 elections, winning a massive 190,000 votes on an open list, with a social media-driven campaign using simple populist and anti-system, anti-corruption tropes. The YouTuber senator has become the public face of opposition to closed lists, publishing Facebook videos (some with over 2–3 million views) attacking closed lists as a mafia to favour regional caciques, warning that closed lists will impose manipulable candidates, ‘seat buying’ and prevent young newcomers like him from being elected, leading to nothing less than the death of democracy.
To sweeten the deal, the government moved to include several ‘benefits’ for congressmen. These nefarious and self-serving articles in bills, which would be known as riders in the United States, are colloquially known as micos in Colombia (mico is also the most common Colombian word for monkey). A proliferation of micos in a bill creates orangutans…
A transitional paragraph included in the conciliated text would allow parties, in 2026, to take into account incumbent congressmen’s order of election in 2022. This provision set off a firestorm. Representatives like Katherine Miranda (Green), Cathy Juvinao (Green) and Jennifer Pedraza (Dignidad) denounced it as a mico that would automatically secure the reelection of incumbents. It led to a nasty brawl and blame game between the Pacto and the Greens. Pacto representatives María del Mar Pizarro and Susana Boreal claimed that this mico was included by Green senator Ariel Ávila and accused (without much evidence) the Greens of seeking to sabotage the reform. Ávila denied this, saying that the article was included at the initiative of the traditional parties while the closed lists were the initiative of the Pacto. He said that the Pacto needs to learn to defend what the government proposes and not blame others for its failures. The president of the Senate, Roy Barreras, backed him up, saying that neither the government or Ávila had put any mico in the text.
The brawl over the mico threatened the final adoption of the conciliated version in the House in December 2022, and the government needed to intervene to secure its adoption while saying that the debate could be reopened in the second round of debates.
The other main element of the political reform was public campaign financing. The reform stated that electoral campaigns would hereafter be entirely financed with public funds, while allowing parties to receive private contributions to finance their operations (in addition to public financing).
The political reform would impose a limit of three consecutive terms for members of Congress, departmental assemblies, municipal councils and local administrative boards (JAL). This would mean that members would not be able to serve more than 12 years in any one body.
The reform would also have eliminated the power of the Procuraduría to suspend and remove elected officials from office. This is personal for Petro, but would also make Colombia compliant with the Inter-American Court of Human Right’s 2020 sentence (in the case of Petro vs. Colombia) which had ruled that Procuraduría’s power to remove elected officials from office violated article 23 of the American Convention on Human Rights (on political rights), as elected officials may only be dismissed from office following a criminal conviction by a judge. The reform would have amended the constitution to make clear that elected officials’ political rights may only be limited following a judicial sentence by a competent judicial authority.
In 2021, Congress adopted by a law sponsored by Inspector General Margarita Cabello — supported by Iván Duque — which ended up increasing the Procuraduría’s power by giving it jurisdictional authority and thereby maintaining its powers against elected officials, making a mockery of the IA Court’s sentence. On February 16, the Constitutional Court ruled (5 to 4) that the Procuraduría’s jurisdictional powers were unconstitutional and that the final decision on the suspension, removal and ineligibility of elected officials could only be made by a judge (although the Procuraduría could still issue those sanctions). The Court’s narrow decision was controversial, criticized by Petro but also esteemed legal minds like Rodrigo Uprimny.
The conciliated version of the reform eliminated articles that would have reduced the age of candidacy for the Senate and the House to 25 (currently 30 and 25). The Pacto and some others had tried to reduce the age of eligibility for the House to 18. An uribista congressman opposed this, saying that when he was 18 he only thought about partying, women and sex…
The reform, finally, left out other points: the possibility of compulsory voting (initially included in the commission’s text in the Senate), changes to rules about legal party status and any reform to the electoral institutions. A separate proposal by senators Ariel Ávila and Humberto de la Calle to create an electoral court and electoral council to replace the CNE and Registraduría died in commission in October, with the government not moving to support it.
In addition to the aforementioned mico, the text became filled with other sweet treats aimed at soothing members of Congress. These include a two-month floor crossing window that would allow politicians to switch parties without losing their seats (floor crossing, or transfuguismo, is banned; the 2009 political reform also included a temporary floor crossing window). A modification to the rules of ineligibility for members of Congress would allow them to hold public or private office immediately upon leaving their seats (there is currently a one-year waiting period) — for example, this would allow congressmen to immediately become cabinet ministers after resigning their seats. In addition, this would also allow congressmen to run for another office — like mayor or governor in October 2023 — by simply resigning their seats on the day their register their candidacies (currently, there is a one-year period which forces any future candidates to give up their congressional seat a year in advance of the election). In face of criticisms, interior minister Alfonso Prada vehemently defended this provision as a guarantee of ‘political representation’ in government.
Currently, since 2015, parties which have won, together, up to 15% of the vote are allowed to run a single coalition list. This is what allowed the Pacto Histórico to run as a coalition in 2022. The reform would’ve allowed any parties, even the stronger ones (which now includes the Pacto), to run in coalition. Small parties cried foul, saying that it would ‘wipe out’ political minorities in favour of big parties. Katherine Miranda made clear her disappointment with Petro and the Pacto, while Jennifer Pedraza said that Petro, as senator, would have voted against his current political reform. As both rightly pointed out, the Pacto in opposition strongly opposed a previous attempt by the traditional parties to eliminate the 15% limit for coalitions. Now that they’re the largest party in Congress, they suddenly don’t care as much…
Open wounds
The text that Congress was to take up again in March had become a ‘Christmas tree’, straying from the original intentions of the political reform and looking more and more like a self-serving reform by politicians.
The first round of debate in 2022 left many open wounds. The biggest one being a deep rift between the government and the Greens, largely over closed lists. In the past, along with other ‘alternative’ parties, the Greens often supported the idea of closed lists, even though as a party of disparate factions and assorted personalities, its politicians are more comfortable with open lists when push comes to shove. Now, the party’s leading figures — like Antonio Navarro and senator Angélica Lozano — say that most of the party is opposed to closed lists, some saying that they like the idea in theory but that in practical terms, with weak intra-party democracy and a weak party system, it would be problematic.
In the new year, Roy Barreras — a fervent supporter of closed lists — added fuel to the lingering fire, tweeting in his usual caustic tone that opposing closed lists is opposing the peace agreement. This isn’t true — the peace agreement did mandate a political and electoral reform (which, by the way, was never adopted) but nowhere does it mention closed lists.
Aimed at the Greens, Barreras added that opposing closed lists is also opposing the government’s agenda while being a government party. A vapid back-and-forth between Barreras and Green senators and representatives followed, with the Greens reaffirming their opposition and proclaiming that they wouldn’t give in to blackmail or be forced to blindly follow the government’s directions. Two days later, Petro chimed in, tweeting his support for closed lists.
The return of the micos
As debate was set to resume, the political reform was battered and in poor shape. With the micos and other sweets, it looked less and less like a structural reform to fix what’s broken in Colombian institutions and elections. Closed lists were hanging by a thread and unfortunately the debate was uninspired, between those who present closed lists as a silver bullet to fix corruption and clientelism and loud clickbait YouTubers who see sinister conspiracies in closed lists.
On March 16, the rapporteurs’ report (ponencia) for the fifth debate in the first commission of the Senate was published. The new ponencia returned to optional closed lists, but with confusing and bizarre ‘incentives’ that would nudge parties towards running closed lists—like 30% more public party financing and a better placement on the ballot paper. It restored the 15% limit on coalitions, but as another ‘incentive’ for closed lists, it raised it 20% in case of closed lists. The new ponencia also sought to raise the threshold for a party to be legally recognized from 3% to 5%, but would have retained the 3% election threshold for the Senate.
The ponencia would have allowed members of Congress would have been allowed to hold non-elected national public office immediately upon resigning their seat but also allowed to automatically retake their seats—creating a ‘revolving door’ allowing congressmen to become ministers, and later return to Congress. But most explosively, the ponencia still included the infamous mico allowing parties to take into account their incumbents’ order of election in 2022 in the next elections. These two micos—the ‘revolving door’ and ‘immediate reelection’—would lead to the final downfall of the entire reform.
Agony and death
Loudly denouncing these two micos, Green rep. Katherine Miranda, Dignidad rep. Jennifer Pedraza and others opposed the ponencia. Pedraza accused the government and Barreras of deceiving the country.
They received support from former Pacto senator Gustavo Bolívar, who since resigning his Senate seat last December has become a ‘defender of the Petro government’, mostly on social media. Bolívar said that the Pacto could not support a reform with these micos. Senator Humberto de la Calle said that the political reform had worsened so much that it was best to kill it. Barreras was still desperate to save it, or at least the only thing that mattered to him in it: the closed lists (he said that closed lists were the only thing that mattered and that the rest could disappear)
On March 22, Miranda asked interior minister Prada to either eliminate the micos or to withdraw the entire reform. Her request was quickly signed by over 70 members of Congress from different parties.
The writing was on the wall. It became clear that the reform was unsalvageable and that the opposition (CD and CR), joined by some Greens, Liberals, Conservatives and La U, would have the votes to kill it in the first commission of the Senate.
On March 22, in the first commission, the reform’s opponents tried to kill the text themselves by voting it down. The Pacto worked to avoid a humiliating defeat, using whatever tricks they could to delay a vote, with help from the president of the first commission, Liberal senator Fabio Amín, something which angered other members. Jota Pe Hernández recorded himself for social media, telling his followers that the Pacto had pulled a dirty trick to save the reform, which Pizarro loudly and angrily denied. In the end, Roy Barreras swooped in, coming back from chemotherapy, to announce that he had convened a plenary session of the Senate (to debate an unrelated matter), which forced the commission to adjourn—postponing debate (and voting) on the reform.
Late on March 22, the Pacto Histórico’s caucus in the House asked the government to withdraw the reform. It lamented that the micos had rendered the text completely different from the original version, hypocritically blaming it on the ‘political class’ and politiquería. Supporters of the reform, like Pacto senator María José Pizarro, now said they no longer supported the political reform.
President Gustavo Petro himself threw his weight in the matter, tweeting that no “progressive themes” were left in the reform. Without closed lists with gender parity and without public campaign financing, the reform, Petro said, did not bring any improvements in the quality of politics.
It was left up to Roy Barreras to deliver the final rites to the reform, complete with a choreographed dramatic finale. He explained that without closed lists, the political reform would lack meaning. Barreras, who dabbled in acting (he played himself in a theatrical production about his career in 2021), grabbed the physical text of the political reform and ripped it up. He asked the interior minister to withdraw the political reform, saying that they still had three years to carry out the deep, structural political reform that Colombia needs. Prada duly announced that he was withdrawing the reform.
The dramatic scene—literally ripping up the political reform for the cameras—was the government and the Pacto’s way of burying a reform that had become a liability, without losing face (too much).
The opposition senators, and Jota Pe, still wanted to kill the reform themselves rather than allow the government to save face by withdrawing it. They insisted on voting down the text rather than voting on Prada’s withdrawal request. After tense discussions, Barreras finally wore them down, and the commission unanimously accepted the government’s withdrawal of its reform.
No one is responsible
Everybody tried to avoid responsibility for the unpopular reform, starting with the Pacto and the government. No one wanted to admit that they had supported the reform, and certainly nobody wanted to admit they were behind the micos. If all the politicians were to be believed, it was as if the reform had appeared out of thin air, all filled with micos. The micos came out of nowhere, behind everyone’s back…
We already saw how Petro himself and the Pacto caucus suddenly withdrew their support from the reform, once it was clear that it was dead. Pacto senator María José Pizarro pointed out that she wasn’t a rapporteur for the text and went on to lay the blame on a ‘traditional political class’ that entrenches itself in power and refuses to reform the political system, thereby avoiding any sort of admission of responsibility for the Pacto. Roy Barreras went on with a long football analogy where the political reform was an ‘own goal’ early in the second half after a successful first half. Yet, at the same time, he sought to shift blame for the micos onto others: he blamed Green senator, and co-rapporteur, Ariel Ávila for the ‘revolving door’ mico. In an interview, Ávila retorted that lead rapporteur was Barreras and that the political reform was an initiative of the Pacto and the government.
Those who had been against the reform for more than 24 hours didn’t buy those stories. Jota Pe Hernández said that the government was cynically lying to the country by saying that they didn’t like the reform when they were the ones who signed it and presented it. It’s hard to deny that he’s right.
Jennifer Pedraza pointed out that, just 24 hours before, the government was still “devoutly defending it, with micos and all.” She said that the reform didn’t become twisted, it was born twisted, with the micos being defended by Pacto congressmen (she specifically named Bogotá Pacto representative Heraclito Landinez) and gender parity requirements being removed by the Pacto itself when it introduced the ‘automatic reelection’ mico last year. She rightfully pointed out that Barreras had signed the final ponencia, on March 16, which still included the infamous micos. Green rep. Cathy Juvinao called Barreras shameless for trying to wash his hands of the reform when he was the ‘brains’ of the reform and all its ‘orangutans’.
Of course, among opponents of the reform, everyone rushed to take personal credit for the reform’s demise. CR senators like David Luna, Jorge Enrique Benedetti and Carlos Fernando Motoa took credit and said that they had warned people all along. Bogotá mayor Claudia López congratulated her party, the Greens, for defeating the reform—before correcting to also give credit to other parties like the Liberals and the senators of the first commission.
What’s clear is that the death of the political reform was the Petro administration’s first major legislative defeat (but not its last one) and a big political humiliation. Barreras optimistically claims that there will be a real political reform within the next year, or at least in the next three years of this government. I don’t share his ‘optimism’. If the government couldn’t get a ‘clean’ reform through in its first year, it won’t have the political capital and congressional backing to get a major political reform through later—just ask Iván Duque. It’s therefore looking increasingly unlikely that any of Petro’s big ambitious promises for institutional/electoral reform will actually see light of day.
Colombia’s political system is in need of some serious reforms. Petro’s political reform never fully addressed all the issues, and like other attempts at political reform before it, the government and Congress allowed it to turn into a Christmas tree filled with ‘orangutans’ that would benefit the interests of the government, its congressional caucus and members of Congress more generally. Whatever good intentions the reform had at first, they were quickly dissolved in a very mediocre and uninspired text of limited value but with a lot of immoral micos. It’s a story as old as time…