Luz María Múnera, who is a representative to the Chamber for the Historical Pact, spoke about the future of the reforms proposed by the Government of President Gustavo Petro in the new legislature of Congress that begins on July 20.
She stated that “it is going to be a very interesting year in this legislature that is beginning, I think that Congress has the ball to approve the reforms that the country really needs, but I also believe that the public is going to play a very important role.”
Likewise, Múnera stressed that during the last legislature good results were left as far as the Government is concerned, since he said that “it is not a bad legislature, compared to the three reforms that the Government had projected, two were left alive and another will have to be presented again,” he told La W.
For his part, he added that “the strategy that was being advanced in the face of more collective conversations with the parties is now a strategy to be able to talk with the congressmen, with each one of them, in that there will be changes in how we relate to them in order to carry out the reforms.”
In addition, he referred to the upcoming regional elections that will take place on October 29. “The Colombian left and the alternative movement have always done well when they manage to unite, if we achieve unity and manage to walk in the same direction, we can have great victories in October.”
What is the panorama of the reforms that the Petro Government intends to present in the new legislature?
A little over a month ago, when the legislative sessions ended, Interior Minister Luis Fernando Velasco accepted that the various reforms proposed by the government had been “too ambitious.” However, just before the start of a new legislature, it seems that this learning was of little use, since the purpose that is once again is to start processing everything that failed at the time and this scenario is apparently not going to have anything different.
Meanwhile, the agenda that the “Government of change” will propose in the Congress of the Republic contains a series of highly complex initiatives that will again represent a challenge for them to be approved in their entirety. On the one hand, the controversial health and pension reforms are still underway, in which it was shown that there is a knot that is difficult to untie and from which the exit is still not seen. To this is added that these fractured the coalition, and were the main causes of two great ministerial revolts.
On the other hand, the labor reform that did not have a good outcome in the previous legislature will be filed; others that will also begin their process in the Congress of the Republic are the reforms to education and public services; the prison humanization law and, once again, the law on submission to justice which, according to the Government itself, could become a reform of the Justice and Peace Law. To these would be added the Mining Code, the Railway Code and even a project to reform the Victims Law.
“There are countless projects, all very ambitious. The Government is not aware of the political reality of the country, nor of Congress. It is impossible to process that agenda with the treatment of the parties. We must rethink and reconfigure the relationship with the parties. Consensus is needed,” the representative Katherine Mirada, of the Green Alliance, assured El Colombiano.
For Senator Iván Cepeda “experience indicates that it is necessary to concentrate on the reforms”, for which he urged to rethink the need to file some initiatives right now. “You don’t have to spread out too much. I am not in favor of adding more reforms to those that already exist”.
The Minister of the Interior continues with his tone of imposition by stating that “Social reforms are going because they are going. It is what the government spoke to Colombians and it is what the government defends as a proposal for change,” Velasco said. Without a doubt, what they do is generate discomfort in Congress, due to the raised tone used in it. with Infobae