The President Who Doesn't Want to Be President

The soft coup that Petro had warned about for so long has finally arrived, but, curiously enough, it was carried out by someone from his own party. On Wednesday morning, just 11 days before the presidential runoff election, the chairwoman of the Accusations Committee requested the provisional suspension of President Gustavo Petro for engaging in partisan political activity. What was surprising was not Representative Gloria Arizabaleta's decision—Petro has been blatantly involved in politics ever since the first-round election results were announced—but rather the fact that she herself belongs to the president's party, Pacto Histórico.

The measure is intended to sanction the president and suspend him until June 21, the day of the runoff election. Yet rather than serving as a punishment, the suspension arrives as a blessing for Gustavo Petro and for Iván Cepeda's struggling campaign. If upheld, the decision would allow the president to participate openly in politics while handing him, on a silver platter, a victimhood narrative about how the establishment is persecuting him.

It is striking that the ruling came only days after the president himself threatened to resign in order to personally lead Cepeda's campaign. At the same time, it is suspicious that Representative Arizabaleta belongs to the governing party. It should not surprise anyone if Gustavo Petro, who has ignored other rulings in the past, complies with this suspension without hesitation.

Since the news broke, a major legal and political controversy has emerged over whether Arizabaleta actually has the authority to make such a decision or whether the measure is fundamentally irregular. The Constitution is clear that the power to suspend or remove a president belongs to the Senate, not to the Accusations Committee. Nevertheless, Arizabaleta justifies her decision by citing Constitutional Court jurisprudence and various constitutional protection rulings.

The logic behind Representative Arizabaleta's decision—she is the former wife of the skilled political operator Roy Barreras—resembles the reasoning the national government has employed on numerous occasions. Just as Petro once argued that if you remove the “il” from illegal, no crime is being committed anymore, Arizabaleta's thesis seems to be that if the president is no longer president, the risk of him illegally participating in politics disappears as well.

With this measure, Gustavo Petro gets the best of both worlds. He remains in office, interrupted only by a brief ten-day suspension, while also being free to place himself at the forefront of his candidate Iván Cepeda's campaign. The absurdity of the situation reminds us why Colombia is the land of magical realism. The law leads us to believe that Gustavo Petro is still the President of the Republic, yet the order signed by the chairwoman of the Accusations Committee—a member of Petro's own party—tells us otherwise.

The measure leaves us with more questions than answers. Is Francia Márquez now the President of Colombia? Why is Roy Barreras—sorry, Gloria Arizabaleta—so interested in suspending Petro? If the president is no longer president, when can we expect his next contribution to Cepeda's campaign?

The truth is that the measure is so absurd that it is unlikely to have any legal effect whatsoever. Yet it stands as a clear demonstration of the desperation that exists within one sector of the political spectrum.