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The Council of State, the highest administrative court, annulled this Thursday the election – due to double militancy – of the president of the Colombian Congress, Roy Barreras, key in the management of ambitious reforms of President Gustavo Petro.
Barreras was a congressman for the U Party (center-right) between 2018 and 2022, and re-elected in March 2022 as a candidate for the Pacto Histórico, the leftist coalition led by Petro.
According to the court, the politician failed in “his duty to resign from his seat 12 months before the date of registration for congressional elections for the period 2022-2026”, for which he violated electoral regulations and incurred double militancy.
In a message on Twitter, Barreras complied with his immediate expulsion from Congress: “The rulings of justice are respected even if they seem unfair to me,” he wrote.
He also anticipated that he will file a legal appeal before the Council of State to “restore the right” of his constituents.
A friend of power and of the right-wing elites that have ruled Colombia for several decades, Barreras was a Petro bishop before he became president.
As president of Congress, he supported most of the reform laws that the government has presented in nine months, especially a tax reform to toughen taxes on the richest.
Experts point out that his role was key to reaching consensus between the different parties that support Petro and those that do not.
On Wednesday night, the president himself thanked Barreras on Twitter for “his decisive role in the approval of the Development Plan”, the government’s road map until 2026.
Leftist senator Iván Cepeda complained on Twitter about the “obvious (…) campaign to frustrate the changes and reforms promoted” by the government.
Thus, the first leftist president of Colombia adds a new setback in his relationship with the legislature.
Last week Petro broke relations with three traditional parties that supported him just after he took office on August 7, but later opposed his reforms.
Faced with the difficulty of making the promises he made to his constituents come true, the president replaced seven of his ministers, including the Treasury.
On May 1, from a balcony of the presidential Casa de Nariño, he anticipated to Congress the possibility of a “revolution” if they do not approve his proposals and asked his voters to protest in the streets.
