With less than 70 days before the first presidential round, political parties define which candidate they will support for the elections on May 29. One of the communities that is in this process is the Liberal Party that lived a busy week, after its comings and turns with the Historical Pact.
On March 23, the president of the Liberal Party, Cesar Gaviria, published a statement in which he assures that a dialogue with Gustavo Petro's Historical Pact is “unfeasible”. According to the document “the politics of hatred, anger and meanness do not go with the Liberal Party”. This happened, after Francia Márquez was confirmed as the vice-presidential formula of the former mayor of Bogotá.
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Thus, there was speculation that the support of that community would go to Federico Gutiérrez's campaign, but apparently the former Colombian president will play a different card. According to the La W station, the intention of the head of the Liberal Party is to free his members to freely choose their preferred candidate.
Apparently, the decision would be made official next Tuesday, March 29, after a meeting between current and elected liberal congressmen. In it, Gaviria would release the affiliates of liberalism. The news was announced by journalist Daniel Coronell in his Cornell Report on the radio station and states that the determination “stems from the fact that today it is impossible to reach a consensus between senators and elected liberal representatives.”
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And the impossibility of union lies in the fact that the fourteen elected senators do not feel related to Gustavo Petro's campaign. On the other hand, almost all representatives in the house feel petrists. Former President Gaviria, for his part, thinks that liberal voters tend to be more with Petro than with Gutierrez. “The liberal people are inclined to accompany Gustavo Petro because, according to the former president, the leftist candidate's speech is more in tune with liberal ideals.” This was expressed by the Colombian journalist based in Miami.
According to the president of Cambio para Gaviria, Petro must comply with certain premises so that he can have the official support of liberalism. One of them is respect for the autonomy of the Banco de la República, compliance with contracts agreed nationally and internationally. In addition, he must expressly commit himself to the country, not to undertake constitutional reforms aimed at prolonging his tenure in power beyond the four-year period for which he would eventually be elected.
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According to Coronell, former President César Gaviria believes that these points and others that have to do with the relationship with the armed forces are crucial for Petro to be able to govern and carry out the reforms he proposes.
On the other hand, from the Liberal Party, they contradict what was published in La W, they affirm that it will not be until after Easter that the position of the collective will be defined for the elections on May 29.
It should be noted that Gaviria has no chance of making alliances with the presidential candidate, Ingrid Betancourt, whose main speech is the rejection of “machinery”, that is, political parties. Nor with Sergio Fajardo, who has said publicly and repeatedly that he does not want to have any political or personal relationship with César Gaviria.
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