Finally, the C-word

COLOMBIA - In Brief 18 Mar 2024 by Andrés Escobar Arango

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On Friday, March 15, in a speech aimed to invigorate his supporters, out of the blue, President Petro came out with a proposal everyone feared since he ran for president; namely, aiming to change the constitution via a Constitutional Assembly (CA). He finally recurred to the C-word. In his own words, “Colombia has to go to a national constituent assembly [that] transforms the institutions, so that they obey the people’s will.” Recall that during the presidential campaign he repeatedly said that he would not change the constitution, since it was written in 1991 by an assembly in which his guerrilla group, M19, had close to one third of the members. Petro himself had sworn "on a marble stone" that he would not convene a CA. Let us first review the procedure to convene a CA. The 1991 Constitution made it difficult to reform the Constitution by means other than Congress, via the so-called “Legislative Act”, approved by the two chambers of congress in two consecutive rounds (8 votes in total, with qualified majority in the second round of voting), and contingent upon scrutiny by the Constitutional Court. If, instead of asking Congress to introduce changes to the Constitution, Petro wants to circumvent this and go directly to the people through a CA, it requires: 1) a law approving to convene said Assembly. 2) This law requires scrutiny of the Constitutional Court, and 3) at least a third of the electoral census should vote in favor of convening it. As of March 2024, 40,292,068 citizens are authorized to vote. Hence, for convening the constituent assembly, 13,430,689 people have to vote positively. That is, Petro would need 2,138,703 more voters than the 11,291,986 who elect...