“Do you agree that day work lasts maximum 8 hours?” With a popular consultation, Colombian president Gustavo Petro wants to submit their reforms to the approval of citizens, already rejected by Congress.
The president presented on April 22 the 12 questions he wishes to take to the electoral process, crossed out of obvious and populists for the opposition.
What is the consultation?
Petro seeks the support of Colombians to reform health and labor systems, after their projects sank into the Legislative.
The consultation, to occur, first has to pass a filter in Congress: The vote of the Senate. If this corporation does not endorse it with 53 of its 105 votes, there will be no popular consultation.
The second filter will be citizen participation. To be valid, at least 13.6 million people must participate in the vote, above the 11.2 million who voted for Petro In 2022.
To overcome the threshold, the questions with an affirmative answer will come true if they get half plus one of the valid votes. “The consultation forces in less than six months to approve as laws the questions approved by the people, and if Congress does not approve them, the president is empowered to approve them by decree,” Petro warned in Network X. Congressmen have rejected most of their projects.
The questions
The questions are designed with two possible answers: yes or no.
“Do you agree that the work on Sunday or festive rest is paid with a 100 % surcharge? Armando Benedetti and Antonio Sanguino, respectively.
Mostly questions lead to reduce the day and expand labor rights. One of them, for example, states that workers obtain licenses for “disabling menstrual periods.”
The opposition to the president argues that Petro is actually trying to win voters for the left with a view to the presidential ones of 2026in which by law he will not be able to seek re -election.
In the debate, by, Lina Garrido, representative to the camera for radical change, said that The efforts that Armando Benedetti, Minister of the Interior, is doing in order to obtain votes to approve the popular consultation will end badly.
“I believe that this must happen as the worst accident in the history of Colombians and every thing that has and that the signature of the national government has, today the presumption is that it is fully contaminated. And I return and repeat and I have said it in these cameras and in these microphones, Everyone who makes agreements with the government, all those who are meeting with Benedetti today to approve the popular consultation will end badlybecause this government only uses them to later, when they are involved in a prison, just says President Petro: ‘I didn’t know, I didn’t name them, I didn’t grew them.’ You wash your hands. And here the only ones who are carrying all the dirty water is the Congress of the Republic, while the National Government is given innocent, above all this scandal that he itself fosters or roads, ”said the representative.
He added: “Then I, really, I think that all this must give the congressmen a patriotic value, to the representatives to the Chamber that everything that has to do with this government is impunity, is corruption, jam, clientelism, while President Gustavo Petro draws a sword and threatens us, emerges and puts us to a whole country against what is being done, he does not know and intends to wash his hands, From the same Casa de Nariño, they gave jam to congressmen in order to carry out the reforms. ”
Street pressure
The last two processes of this type in the country failed. An anti-corruption consultation of 2018 promoted by center-left politicians that did not reach the necessary threshold and the 2016 plebiscite to approve the historic peace agreement with the FARC.
Former President Juan Manuel Santos lost at the polls and had to reformulate the agreement with the guerrillas. In 2017 the bulk of the FARC deposed the weapons.
Convinced to keep the popular support that led him to be Colombia’s first president in 2022, Petro will play his letters in the consultation.
The president has summoned his followers different occasions to march in the streets in favor of his reforms and against what he calls an institutional blockade in Congress.
