Álvaro Uribe’s succession

Muddy waters

The political year in Colombia has started quite wildly. With Senator Gina Parody’s resignation both to her Congressional seat and the ruling Party of the U, and at the same time opposing Álvaro Uribe Vélez’s second re-election, the breachs in the ruling coalition have become official. Though her absence from the Congress will not affect the number of votes favouring Uribe, the fact that Ms Parody had been one of his closest allies in the local parliament sheds light on the extent the re-electionist project has started to break down from its own entrails.

But Ms Parody’s resignation is not an exception to the rule. The presidential pre-candidate poses of Andrés Felipe Árias, Minister of Agriculture, or “presidentico” as columnist Antonio Caballero calls him, are striking. If a man as close to president Uribe as Mr Árias is daring to promote himself as an alternative to succeed him is because Uribe is aware that his immediate re-election is not that clear, no matter his efforts to prop it up, such as the nightly decrees issued to save the referendum.

If we add to this panorama the visits to the presidential residence paid by possible Uribista pre-candidates as Marta Lucía Ramírez and Rodrigo Rivera on 21 January, in order to show their intentions to run for elections, this means the dark clouds are foretelling a storm.

The blindness of the haughty

Power fascinates people and therefore president Uribe is still betting on victory, counting on the recently renewed Constitutional Court which, with the election of the remaining two justices, probably sympathetic to the government, could change the jurisprudence on the issue and approve the referendum, despite its legal failures. That is a risky bet, because reaching the top post in the judiciary implies a lot of responsibility, and it would be quite unlikely someone with a brilliant career would throw it overboard for doing political favours.

But the President either does not see this or does not care about it, is still confident that everything will turn out right for him, and starts making mistakes which can be quite costly at this time of the game. The bureaucratic retaliations against centre-right Radical Change party and the operations in order to divide it threaten to break the ruling coalition. Although President Uribe is a master when it comes to shady deals, Radical Change leader Germán Vargas Lleras is a hard nut to crack.

After the initial announcement by some Radical Change senators offering their support for the referendum for re-election in 2010, leaving their leader Germán Vargas out of the electoral game, his call to the order ended unifying the party again. They will support re-election only for 2014, a symptom that Radical Change is already seeing Uribe’s decline, bringing the presidential candidacy of Vargas himself out into the game.

Though the referendum law can still pass without Radical Change’s votes, the uncertainty is growing in the Uribista camp. And if you add to this the lack of financial clarity in the referendum campaign for signatures, mistakes of procedure during the discussions in Congress, and time running short in order to put it forward, together with the awakening of the Uribista leaders’ presidential appetites, the referendum for re-election is dying without a cure and, which is the worst thing, with no mourners.

When the cat’s away, the mice will play

Caudillism builds everything around the caudillo. When he’s gone, he takes everything with him, and Uribe is not the exception. Without Uribe, and because his votes are not endorsable, the task remains in hands of his supporters, which lack not only his charisma, but who are also facing a different country, which no longer votes based on fear but on their pockets, favouring chaos in the pro-government camp. But opposition is also facing difficulties, because it does not count with a leader uniting it and with a winning vocation.

With no strong candidate and no matter who wins, we glimpse a minority government, subject to provisional alliances which will force to a co-government system. Rule will not be for one, as it happened in the Uribe era, but for many, as it used to be before. The problem is that in the past there were strong parties which could handle local lords in order to preserve governability. This time there are only poor party imitations, with no cohesion, whose members only take heed on their pockets and, with everyone pulling to their own side, the country will likely stuck for a long time.

This is the price we pay for the Uribista de-institutionalization process. Without strong parties and institutions, Colombia will have to hit bottom in order to recover. But the crisis coming does not mean a debacle, or in Uribista terminology, hecatomb. Maybe we should learn from the Chinese, who write “crisis” (危機, wēijī) by putting the characters for danger and chance together. That is the key. But it will not be soon. The old actors are still on the platform, and after 2010, there will be a ex president conspiring in the shadows to return to power.

Nevertheless, no matter what happens, the important thing is not to repeat because, as T. S. Eliot once said, “if we can never be right, it is better that we should from time to time change our way to be wrong”.

This article was originally published 24 January 2009 on equinoXio. Translated from Spanish by Julián Ortega Martínez

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