President Gustavo Petro faces this week a fire test for his government and his political future. On Tuesday, the Senate of the Republic begins to discuss whether or not to approve the popular consultation proposed by the Executive, with 12 questions, to improve the rights of millions of workers. The final vote will be Wednesday. With a victory in La Plenaria, Petro will have the green light to begin in advance the electoral campaign of the 2026 elections and, in addition, it will be able to consolidate as its own the flag of the defense of labor rights that has been well received in public opinion. But, with a defeat, the president would lose the opportunity to channel resources and efforts to promote one of his great campaign promises. O Petro achieves a respite for the final stretch of his campaign, or definitively deflate. There will be no ambiguities.
This will happen in Congress while Petro is on a foreign trade trip in China to define whether Colombia joins the silk route. The person in charge of the entire legislative procedure will be the Interior Minister, Armando Benedetti, who confessed this Monday in an interview in Caracol Radio that “is scared” for the result of the vote of the consultation. “This week I have to add and tell,” said Benedetti, but insisted that he believes that the government has the necessary votes. “I am optimistic that the consultation passes, how are they going to deny that faculty to the people?” He added.
The fear of the veteran minister, who today has control in the Casa de Nariño, is due to the fact that the votes required by this mechanism of citizen participation to be approved are still sure. The environment in Congress is tense for the recent capture of the former president of the Senate, Iván Name, and the former president of the House of Representatives, Andrés Calle, for his alleged participation in the case of corruption of the Risk and Disaster Management Unit (UNGRD). They are accused of having received billionaire bribes to support Petro’s reforms.
In the midst of the scandal, the government has tried to get the votes of sectors that still do not define its position against the consultation, especially of the Liberal Party (13 senators) and the U Party (10 senators). With respect to liberals, there seems to be an important advance. This weekend, the arrival of Diana Marcela Morales as a new Minister of Commerce was formalized, who has the support of a sector of the Liberal Party, and was so far the Secretariat of the Fourth Commission of the House of Representatives, a position that grants power in the legislative procedures and relations with congressmen of different banks. The appointment can be key to bowing the balance in a vote that will surely be very narrow.
However, former president César Gaviria, single head of the liberal community, issued a statement in which he rejects the consultation and ensures that Morales does not represent the position of his party. Petro’s popular consultation, he said, “is an inadmissible waste in the midst of the fiscal crisis that the country is going through,” reads the text. And it continues: “That money should be used to urgently improve workers’ conditions, support victims, strengthen public force and finance social policies that benefit those who need it most. So we recommend that the Senate of the Republic not vote for the consultation, wrong and inefficient initiative.”
Before the debate starts, telling the most or less insured votes in favor, the government has an advantage that is not broad or definitive, but that could be enough. The Senate’s Board of Directors determined that the consultation was an ordinary law and therefore does not need an absolute majority but a simple majority. That is, the 53 votes that the Government sought a few weeks ago is no longer necessary. The only thing that requires now is to achieve the quorum and that he does have more votes than not. In principle, the Executive has insured the 20 votes of the Historical Pact, 5 votes of the Common Party, 6 of the Green Party, and 3 of progress. The opposition has in principle 13 votes for the NO of the Democratic Center, 11 of Radical Change, 15 of the conservative. The decision will then be in the 13 of the Liberal Party, the 10 of the U party and other small communities such as Christian parties, which in the last votes have not supported the government.
All senators, in addition, have another type of pressure that favors the government, and is the high favorability that the popular consultation among Colombians has had, according to surveys. This just in pre -election year, when the next legislative elections are in March 2026, and voters can punish or applaud their legislators according to how they vote this Wednesday.
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