* The unprecedented speech from the balcony
* When the subject is the ideological purge
They were more or less waiting for the day when President Gustavo Petro would show his authentic face. Or perhaps better the full scope of the governmental and political purposes of him as the first president. Well, it is from this perspective that we can describe the fiery oratory the day before yesterday, from the balcony of the Casa Nariño, as the true speech of possession of him. Not because before he had not let his intentions be seen, either in the formal assumption of power or even in the ardent invective before the UN, but because it was in the last hour and a half rhetoric, barely with a half-full Plaza de Armas, but for the sake of of a media transmission carefully adapted to the unprecedented place and tone, when he managed to make his reading of the elections and the outcome of his rupturist project more clear.
What was seen, despite the fact that certain media outlets opted to mitigate the repercussions of the issue, was therefore a president who as such, and perhaps for the first time in Colombian history, literally asked the people to get up, not kneel down, because his intention , he said, is the continuous social mobilization. Or what he also called the “conscious crowd.” And that, likewise, in terms of the erosion of democracy, and whatever adjective is added to mob rule, the Greeks called ochlocracy. But whatever the definition that is wanted, taking care of the normal channels of the representative system, it is about a president who will not give up in the effort to impose his ideological vision on Congress at all costs. And that, therefore, it would seem to be one step away from envisioning representative democracy as the “internal enemy”, in case the reforms are not approved exactly and as he conceives them in terms of the integral rupture exposed, a thesis that for his part I had already outlined in other aspects.
In principle, within a benevolent analysis, it could be thought that such a discourse, in the face of health, pension and labor reforms, only consists of putting pressure on parliamentarians so that they do not assume an autonomous or reflective position in the face of peremptory opinions issued between the neoclassical columns of the presidential residence. In this direction, it would suffice to remember that the parliamentary majority is upside down in its coalition, under the clientelist “take and give me”, a formula adopted as a redemptive method by the “government of change”. It was not in vain that these benches declared themselves pro-government, in the middle of the bureaucratic distribution in the eyes of the entire country, which the political articulators of the administration said that it was an unreserved adhesion, to say the least. And, to tell the truth, otherwise these blocs could have, under the law, declared themselves independent and retained their autonomy. But, of course, they didn’t do it and they won’t do it, thinking that clientelist appetite can be mixed with the often-said idea of “building on what has been built” which is precisely what the president seems to taste like a mico.
Indeed, its central idea continues to be inscribed in the dismantling of all the laws in this regard, arising from the National Constituent Assembly of 1991, the result of the neoliberal onslaught of the government as an indistinct whole. And in this way, take the country back a span from the modifications that then began in different aspects of the Colombian social future in the face of the blatant inefficiency of the State. In this case, as is well known, it deals with the sensitive issue of health and that will serve as a watershed to open the channel for other initiatives.
Under this criterion, what is wanted, then, is for the nation to retrace such a long journey and put things where they supposedly should have been three decades ago. That is, to act as a clean slate because the constituents, and in particular both the then president (César Gaviria) and his star ministers, were incapable of understanding what was really at stake. All of this occurred because, in the presidential opinion, the transitory articles of the new Constitution, mostly incorporated by Gaviria in support of the new laws, were the greatest betrayal of popular postulates, surrender to the crudest materialism and human nonsense produced by its key coalition partner. Who also colluded (this is true given the scope of the revocation of that time) so that the new Congress was just his appendix.
It is then and above all an ideological purge. And not understanding that, just as there are things to change in terms of health, work and pensions, there are also others to preserve. Of course, and as in any purge, this does not fit. That was the real meaning of his speech on the balcony… his real possession speech.