COMMENTARY By imitating Donald Trump's obsession with pushing baseless claims of electoral fraud, leftist Colombian leader Gustavo Petro has put the finishing touch on his dysfunctional presidency.
Disappointment complete, Señor Presidente.
As Colombian President Gustavo Petro continues to rage, baselessly, about fraud in this summer’s election — as he rants to anyone who’ll listen that the winner, right-winger Abelardo de la Espriella, is not the legitimate President-elect who should be sworn in on Friday — he has succeeded in looking, sounding and creepily feeling like the leader he hates most:
U.S. President Donald J. Trump.
In the process, Petro has now fully accomplished the betrayal of anyone who’d hoped Colombia’s first leftist President would leave the sort of respected legacy that could help repair the nation’s deep-seated and debilitating polarization.
READ MORE: Colombia's political center not only doesn't hold anymore — it may no longer even exist
Petro, who under Colombia’s constitution could not run for re-election, is railing not about his loss but that of his party’s presidential candidate, leftist Senator Iván Cepeda. But, like Trump in 2020 — who did lose re-election — Petro is on an obsessive and unhinged crusade to discredit and nullify the result.
“We are facing … the inauguration of an illegitimate president,” Petro said again this week. “I cannot accept this electoral fraud.”
He’s resorted to Trump-style conspiracies, claiming manipulation of election software algorithms that he says sabotaged security locks and compromised tens of thousands of ballots that could have made a difference in the June 21 vote. De la Espriella won by less than a percentage point.
Problem is, no one credible, including international election observers, seems to share Petro’s concerns.
Petro’s politics weren’t the problem; his political incompetence was: It turns out hand-shaking democracy is a lot harder to master than fist-raising dogma.
No matter. In his determination to match Trump, Petro is calling for mass protests by “liberation guards” to overturn De la Espriella’s victory — an eerie echo of Trump’s “fight like hell” exhortation that helped spur his supporters to violently and seditiously attack Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.
Thankfully, though, here’s another similarity in the Petro and Trump meltdowns: Petro too has a Pence. At least sort of.
Hanging threats
When Trump tried to pressure then Vice President Mike Pence into rejecting the legally certified electoral college vote returns on Jan. 6, which Pence could have done, Pence refused.
Likewise, Cepeda accepted the Colombian results — though he has not yet been threatened with hanging by Petro’s legions, as Pence was by Trump’s on Jan. 6.
Cepeda has since, however, said he’s taking a “civil disobedience” stance against fully recognizing De la Espriella’s presidential legitimacy until he renounces the U.S. citizenship he holds, by naturalization, alongside his Colombian (by birth) and Italian (through grandparents) citizenship.
Colombia’s Constitution does not bar a President from holding multiple nationalities — and if it did, Cepeda would have also had to spend the past four years in civil disobedience against Petro, who himself holds Colombian and Italian passports.
Still, whatever Cepeda’s mushy position is, it’s ultimately a rejection of Petro’s election denialism — and ultimately a reminder of what an erratic disappointment Petro has been as a head of state.
There were of course always worries that Petro — who was a leftist guerrilla in Colombia’s half-century-long civil war, which ended a decade ago — would don a revolutionary’s beret along with the presidential sash.
Even so, most Colombians in 2022 voted for that social justice sensibility, hoping it would accelerate efforts to reform the epic inequalities — among the worst of any nation in the world — that ignited the war in the first place.
But Petro’s politics weren’t the problem; his political incompetence was.
It turns out hand-shaking democracy is a lot harder to master than fist-raising dogma.
He was able to score a few policy victories; a minimum wage increase here, a fossil fuel reduction there. But critical aims like healthcare, labor and infrastructure overhauls sank under the arrogant weight of his inability to work with, or even around, Colombia’s Congress.
Ditto his “Total Peace” plan to get holdover armed groups and criminal gangs to stop terrorizing the country. That key failure helped De la Espriella’s law-and-order populism get elected — especially against the backdrop of Petro’s goofball support for legalizing hard drugs like cocaine.
Add the chronic, bizarre scandals surrounding Petro’s presidency — including the indictment of his son Nicolás for allegedly taking drug cartel bribes — and what’s left is simply more political animus in Colombia instead of the political bridge-building his election promised.
Right now the only puente político it looks as though Petro has built is the one connecting him to Trump.
