Thanks to Fred for posting the Links article by Ana Cristina Carvalhaes. Here are a few observations. (For more, read the article in New Politics posted on May 25 https://newpol.org/consequential-elections-in-colombia/ )
Contrary to Ana Cristina Carvalhaes, the first-round election results were not that much of a surprise. Everyone here in Colombia who was paying attention knew that there was going to be a run-off election between the candidate of the left, Ivan Cepeda, and the candidate of the far-right Abelardo de la Espriella. The only thing that was surprising was that de la Espriella came in first by a few percentage points in the first round. Here are a few important points, First, the left, Ivan Cepeda the candidate of the Pacto Historico, can win the presidential election here in Colombia. The second round of the elections is scheduled for June 21, just 17 days from now. Second, if Abelardo de la Espriella, the candidate of the right, wins in the second round, Colombia will enter a very dangerous period of class struggle. The Pacto Historico believes it needs to get more than 3 million more votes than it did in the first round to win. The key to victory will be the working class and poor of the 20 medium sized and small cities scattered around the country. Third, the Pacto has a detailed plan about how and where to get those votes. Official voter turnout in the first round was 57.9% (23,978, 304 votes out of 41,421,973 eligible voters) which is a high turnout for this country. Normally, if such a condition can be said to exist, voter turnout in the final round of the elections here increases by about 5% over the first round. Where can the Pacto get the 3 million plus votes? First of all, from the 42% of eligible voters who did not vote in the first round. Detailed get-out-the-vote plans are already in place, and tens of thousands of volunteers are working on this project. Second, from what is called the “center”. This includes the political groups led by politicians including Sergio Fajardo and Claudia Lopez, established political parties including the Liberals and two of its descendants, Cambio Radical and the Partido la U, plus some smaller parties groupings. Some of these groups and parties ran their own presidential candidates (e.g. Fajardo and Lopez), while others (e.g. Cambio Radical and the Partido de la U) joined the right-wing coalition that supported failed candidate Paloma Valencia. (Here, a correction to Carvalhaes article is needed. Claudia Lopez, the former Green Alliance leader who ran as an independent candidate for president, did not support Ivan Cepeda, and does not support him now.) Third, from the official right-wing coalition whose candidate was Paloma Valencia and whose vice-presidential candidate was Juan David Oviedo. The campaign of Paloma Valencia crashed and burned in the last month. Although she was leading Abelardo de la Espriella in the polls for most of the campaign, a Brazilian poll called AtlasIntel, started moving de la Espriella ahead of Valencia. AtlasIntel was also on de la Espriella’s payroll! Those polls coincided with the quiet and then public abandonment of Valencia by the political machines of the parties in her coalition, including her own party, Alvaro Uribe’s Centro Democratico. There were 13 candidates on the first-round ballot. Officially, de la Espriella got 10,361,499 votes (43.74 %), Ivan Cepeda got 9,688,361 votes (40.90 %), and Paloma Valencia got 1,639,685 votes (6.92 %). The “center” candidates got between 1,250,000 and 1,500,000 votes (about 6%, depending on which candidates you include in this group). The other candidates got about 2% of the vote divided among them Anecdotally, I spent a couple of days right before the first election day in two small towns controlled by the Conservative Party and the Centro Democratico. Valencia was the candidate of both parties, but there was exactly one sign supporting her, but 28 signs and billboards supporting de la Espriella. Interestingly, and importantly, there were eight signs and billboards supporting Ivan Cepeda whereas there were zero signs in those towns in 2022 supporting the current left wing President Gustavo Petro. Four years ago, Petro supporters were afraid to publicly support him. Now, the left is coming out into the open in the small towns and the countryside all over Colombia. In the days since the first vote, Claudia Lopez and Juan David Oviedo (Lopez is a lesbian who is married to Senator Angelica Lozano, and Oviedo is also gay) have said they will never vote for a homophobic misogynist like de la Espriella. However, they have not called for a vote for Cepeda in the second round. Fajardo has said that he will vote but will not tell others how to vote in the second round. Women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, animal rights, and fracking are key issues in the campaign to win over “center” voters. De la Espriella is famous for his misogynist and homophobic tirades and for killing cats by inserting firecrackers into their bodies and blowing them up. He is also campaigning tirelessly for fracking as much as possible wherever possible. A veritable social media war is going on over these issues now. Although statistics show crime rates to be falling, the rightwing media and political parties, in the tradition of the right everywhere, try to fan the fears of the petty bourgeoisie of crime and violence. Whenever there is a murder, a cell phone theft, or an armed confrontation with drug gangs, it is headline news here. Opposition to Paz Total is used by right wing politicians as part of this campaign of fear. I think Ana Cristina Carvalhaes’s article gives undue emphasis to the right’s opposition to Petro’s Paz Total policy. The right has benefitted from this policy because paramilitary butchers have gotten off with relatively light sentences through the JEP (La Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz which is the agency for transitional justice here.) However, Uribe himself, and his family have had their political credibility destroyed piecemeal and continuously. His brother was just sentenced to 29 years in jail for starting “The 12 Apostles” one of the more important paramilitary groups. What the entire right is more afraid of is the advance of the Pacto Historico’s reform agenda which ranges from the unfinished health care reform and the unfinished energy transition to expansion of labor law and pension reforms. Ana Cristina Carvalhaes’s article also misses a couple of essential points about the Pacto Historico. The Pacto is above all a party of the working class of Colombia. At the heart of its machine is the union movement here, especially FECODE, the teachers’ union. Although small in terms of the percentage of the working class organized into the unions, the unions are a real mass movement because they negotiate the minimum salary with the government for the entire working class of the country. The Pacto is also the expression of a rapid ascent of the left in Colombia that has totally eclipsed the decades long detour into guerilla warfare represented by the FARC and ELN. Since 2014, the votes for the presidential candidates of the left have increased from 1,839,778 to 2,618, 157 to 4,855, 069 to 8,542, 020 to Cepeda’s 9,688,361 in the first round of this year’s election. In every sense of the expression from number of votes, to number of representatives in the chamber and senate, to number of representatives in local and departmental legislative bodies, the Pacto Historico is now by far the largest party in Colombia. However, it is in no sense a majority party, not in terms of the whole adult population of the country, and not even in terms of the voters of the country. Therein lies the current conundrum in Colombia. The country’s bourgeoisie has lost its ability to mobilize poor and working class voters behind its parties and political machines, but they can still mobilize most of the countries vast petty bourgeoisie behind one or another of its factions. To defeat the Pacto, which they desperately want to do, they must unite into a single party. They cannot. This explains the rise of the dictatorial politics of de la Espriella which are farther to the right than the old authoritarian politics of Alvaro Uribe. Carvalhaes’s article does point out the dangers of electoral fraud here, and they are undoubtedly growing now. What will happen is anybody’s guess. The right is desperate, and the left is determined. Whatever happens on June 21 st , the class struggle here is going to intensify. Winning the election will strengthen the position of the working class and oppressed here, but even in the face of an electoral loss, the left and working class are going to be in a much stronger position than in past periods of crisis. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#41937): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/41937 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/119653697/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
