2023-07-22 07:01:00
The result of the vote in which Iván Name was elected as president of the Congress, was not only received as a spectacular defeat for the government of Gustavo Petro, but also reveals failures that the House of Nariño could be having in handling the political doll in the legislature.
There is talk of defeat of the Government because the opposition, in full, voted for Name. And above all because Senator Angélica Lozano, who had received the support of the Petrista bench, that of the Historical Pact, was defeated by five votes.
What happened in the 48 hours prior to the election is a sign of the government’s lack of strategy.
The Green Party was called to occupy the Presidency of the Senate in the period 2023-2024 and within the party they had to choose the chosen one.
Until the last minute they waited on the bench to decide which was the candidate. The delay was due to the fact that Inti Asprilla, until the last moment, considered that he was the one because of all those from the Green Party, he is the closest to President Petro.
The vote was only made one day before July 20, and of the 12 votes of the greens, 9 went to Angélica Lozano. The bench had given its verdict.
However, what nobody counted on was that both Inti Asprilla and Iván Name, and especially the latter, were not going to pay attention to the decision of the bench and were going to end up acting in their own right.
Senator Inti Asprilla, green by tradition, but with roots as Petrist as those of the Historical Pact, sang the table to all his party colleagues and even to the Government itself, assuring that they had favored a candidate who did not risk it, as he did, for Gustavo Petro’s campaign for the 2022 Presidency.
And Senator Iván Name, was left with the highest position in Congress without many conversations with his bench –because he was not in the last key meetings– but with repeated talks with the opposition (Cambio Radical and Centro Democrático) and the “independent” Conservative in which the party president himself, Efraín Cepeda, moved votes for him.
A congressman heard President Petro say that Inti Asprilla was the candidate of his heart, the one most loyal to the political project, but that if he had no chance of winning, it seemed good to him that Angélica Lozano should be chosen. Iván Name, did not seem to be among his sympathies, for being a senator more identified with the center right than with the left.
For all this, the Historical Pact bench had the instruction to vote for Senator Lozano.
The breaking point that split the greens occurred on Wednesday afternoon at the bench meeting from which Asprilla, Name and Senator Fabián Díaz withdrew. And the wound was much more open hours before the installation of Congress, in an appointment in which the Minister of the Interior himself, Luis Fernando Velasco, participated.
At 11 am on July 20, the Greens met with Velasco, but Inti and Name did not want to be at the meeting. The first, because he knew that this assistance was to ratify Lozano; the second, because he was clear that he would nominate himself for the Presidency of the Senate regardless of what his party wanted.
The greens were so clear that the votes for Lozano could be disrupted that EL COLOMBIANO announced since Tuesday that an even more divided scenario was being prepared in which even Senator Ariel Ávila could put his name, in addition to those of Inti and Name. The idea that the Presidency would be defined “by clean vote” came from the party’s own senators.
The one who was not prepared for the result was Minister Velasco, who was convinced that they would put Lozano at the head of Congress. His discomfort was such that he only shook hands with Name and left the premises without saying a word with other congressmen or with the ministers who were in the place, such as Environment Minister Susana Muhamad.
The question that some are asking is why the director of Dapre, Carlos Ramón González, who until recently was the big man of the Green Party, did not intervene to stop the career of a lone ranger that Iván Name undertook?
And there are those who answer that perhaps González could have been interested in the winner being Name, because in terms of politics and transactions he can speak a language more similar to his, than Lozano.
In any case, if that was Carlos Ramón González’s bet, the truth is that he left the government bench in a bad light.
Greens try to pull themselves together
The party divisions are Its militants recognize them outside the microphones, but they prefer not to comment on them on the air because they know that each statement can make the internal dispute more evident and end up opening another battlefront.
What’s more, they say that even Senator Jota Pe Hernández had the idea of aspiring for that position citing his political wealth (189,291 votes in the 2022 legislatures), a result that at the time he brought up against the party, stating that his votes had dragged down those who were further back on the list, like Name himself.
“Name has a more center-right profile. He doesn’t appear in the media because he’s not interested in him and there are people who don’t know who he is. He is going to be an interesting Presidency because of the connections he has with the traditional ones, ”said a party source.
The card that remains for Inti Asprilla is to be a communication bridge with the Government, a dialogue that Name does not have and in which Lozano was not the most skilful either.
There are those who say that Asprilla does not have many sympathies in the party. The closest to him from the Alliance bench is Senator Fabián Díaz, who also left the community meeting on Wednesday in which they voted to nominate Lozano for the Presidency.
Despite the fact that Senator Lozano publicly assured that it was time to turn the page, party sources maintain that they did remain divided. “I always respect the results, I have competed and I always respect the results. The only thing is that there was a bench decision of 12 senators out of 13, but I never fight with the results,” Lozano said Thursday night.
The protagonists of the green novel for the Presidency for now do not want to speak in microphones for the political “hangover” in which the bid on July 20 resulted. However, Senator Ariel Ávila maintained that “the party is in some pain, but it is not so hurt. This fixes fast.”
The opposition factor in the choice of Name
The votes to elect Senator Name were obtained one by one with the efforts of congressmen from Cambio Radical and the Centro Democrático. They were the ones who were in the meetings talking with the political forces to ask them to support him as the most institutionalist alternative of the three green pre-candidacies.
The talks were given until the last moment of the vote. Just as the former president of the Senate, Alexander López Maya, called the list for the plenary session, the congressmen talked among themselves. The president of the Conservative Party, Efraín Cepeda, was speaking with Senator Paloma Valencia, from the Democratic Center, and others from the bench in their seats in Congress.
The same thing happened with the senator of Cambio Radical, Carlos Fernando Motoa, who was with Name during the entire vote.
Iván Name assures that he was not the candidate of the opposition, nor was he the candidate of the Government, but the truth is that he achieved the most powerful position in Congress with the votes of those who do not copy President Petro.
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