Uribe will not be allowed to seek third term
By Manuel Rueda, Editorial Director
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
President Uribe has accepted a ruling by Colombia´s Constitutional Court which says that plans to extend his tenure are “unconstitutional” and prevents him from participating in the May 30th elections.
Colombia´s constitution only allows Presidents to serve two terms in office, but last year Uribe supporters in Congress passed a law that called for a referendum to be staged, in which Colombians would be asked if they would like to change the constitution so that Uribe could run for another term.
In its landmark decision Friday evening, the court said this congressional initiative could not be implemented because several laws were broken as it was approved.
The referendum proposal was brought to Congress in late 2008 after a group of Uribe supporters known as the Referendum Promotion Committee had collected more than 3.5 million signatures from Colombian citizens who wanted the President to serve another term.
The court however found that the Committee had spent six times over the legal limit in its campaign to collect the signatures, receiving donations that were thirty times over the limit for individual donors.
Another problem, according to the court ruling, was that the actual question that congress approved to go on the referendum, which asks if the constitution should be changed for the president to run a “third consecutive term”, was different than the question that was presented to citizens who had signed the referendum petition, which ambiguously asked, if the constitution could be changed for the President to serve “another term”.
The court´s ruling also argued that the referendum initiative was not approved with “a majority” of congressional votes. Last year, the “referendum bill” passed in the house of representatives by a meager two votes, but the court said five of those votes were “invalid” because they were made by congressmen whose ability to vote had been nullified as they had switched parties in the middle of their terms.
The court also said that even if none of these “procedural” errors had occurred, Congressional efforts to extend the President´s stay in office were “unconstitutional” because a third re-election would violate fundamental principles such as the separation of powers, equality, alternation of power, and the system of checks and balances put in place by the 1991 constitution.
Prior to Friday´s decision, Uribe had a comfortable lead in all presidential polls, with his closest opponent, former Medellin mayor Sergio Fajardo, trailing him by more than 35 points.
With Uribe now out of the race, half a dozen contenders have a serious chance of winning the Presidency, as nobody scores higher than 15% in any of the polls.
Sergio Fajardo now leads the pack of Presidential hopefuls which include German Vargas, from the right wing Radical Change Party, Rafael Pardo, from the opposition Liberal Party, Noemi Sanin, from the Conservative Party, Gustavo Petro, from the left-wing Polo Democratico, Uribista Stalwart, and former Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos, who announced he would be joining the Presidential race on Friday, after learning that Uribe will not be allowed to run.
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