Political parties are essential for the existence and proper functioning of a democracy, they must be strong, organized, institutionalized.
In its beginnings, modern democracy developed without the presence of parties as we know them today.
But once they emerged and consolidated, an intimate link with representative democracy was born, in such a way that democracy without parties cannot be conceived today.
In modern and democratic societies, political parties play a series of relevant functions for society and the State: they are essential in electoral processes and in the integration of representative and government bodies, in the formation of public opinion, in offer citizens diverse options for government and programs, as well as being channels of communication between the state and the communities and mainly in fulfilling the functions of checks and balances against a government.
In Colombia, the two traditional parties were born and took root in the mid-19th century, having ideological differences that caused confrontations and wars, later aggravated by the handling of government bureaucracy. With the emergence in 1957 of the pact of the national front to confront the violence that the country was experiencing, a deterioration began in the ideological differentiation between these parties.
Subsequently, in view of the violent events suffered at the end of the 1980s carried out by drug traffickers allied with paramilitaries and guerrillas, the 1991 constituent assembly was carried out, which together with decentralization and electoral reforms sought to improve the quality of democracy, but ended up generating a gradual process of deinstitutionalization of the traditional parties and their atomization with the explosion of personalist candidacies.
The political parties and movements adopted the tactic called “operation wasp” with the consequent split of the electoral lists and micro-enterprises with low votes, fragmented strategies and loss of identity.
Our president, who came to power democratically, insists that he is a democrat and the importance of democratic systems and their preservation. However, the facts cast deep doubts on the reality of these assertions.
At the beginning of his term, he co-opted the traditional parties, very distant from the ideologies that characterize the president and his government, especially the conservative one.
Today in the face of harsh criticism of the health reform, the president makes agreements with the parties, and he and his minister Corcho, highly ideological and with immense repudiation of private companies, say that they have included the agreements in the presentation, but before the fallacious affirmation, the parties definitely do not march to its approval; The government then decides to negotiate retail with each parliamentarian, making use of the usual jam, ignoring the law of benches, the integrity, loyalty and institutionality of the parties, seeking to accelerate their destruction and seriously undermining democracy, in which it says believe and practice.