Through a message on his X account, President Gustavo Petro reacted to the request made by some businessmen in the country who They proposed postponing the discussion of Government reforms in the face of recent corruption allegationswhich involve former officials of his administration and that would also affect several congressmen.
(Read: Petro Government accelerated Budget commitments, but is still hanging on investment).
“They know perfectly well that a single day of postponement collapses the pension reform. They should be clearer. Are they using a corrupt person to overthrow the reforms? This government has not bought nor will it buy congressmen with either public or private money”the head of state wrote this Monday, in response to the request from various sectors to postpone the discussions.
And although the pension reform project recently obtained approval in the second Senate debate, the Government knows that the initiative now faces a race against the clock, in which any postponement would slow down its processing and eventual approval.
(See: Pension reform: what are the points that must be approved in the project?).
The main problem for the initiative now is time and that is its worst enemy.
If the pension reform is not approved on June 20, it will collapse due to lack of processing. For this reason, one of the strategies that the opposition will use will be to try to break the quorum and delay the debate from the moment of the vote on impediments.
For the Government’s accounts, the times are adjusted, and it is even already planned that this will be the strategy, so an attempt will be made to consolidate the alliance with the Liberal Party. In fact, an advantage for the Executive is that both Commission VII and the plenary are in the hands of liberalism, with María Eugenia Lopera and Andrés Calle, respectively. It is a situation contrary to what was experienced in the Senate, where even the president of that corporation, Iván Name, failed the debate on one occasion as a protest against President Petro.
(Also: What the proposed threshold of four minimum wages implies for the pension system).
The initiative would be presented this week to start the process, although the new UNGRD scandal could bog down the process, something that was not among the calculations of the Petro Government.
It will not be an easy path, but without a doubt the Government already knows the functioning of Commission VII, which approved the health reform the previous year, as well as that of the plenary session, where although there are very critical voices that are preparing, the official majority seems to be aligned, for now.
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