Ernesto Samper invited César Gaviria to support the Historical Pact

The former Colombian president invited the top leader of the Liberal party to join forces around the candidacy of Gustavo Petro ahead of the second presidential round in Colombia

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In image, former Colombian presidents Ernesto Samper and César Gaviria. Photos: Colprensa (Sergio Acero)

In mid-May, former Colombian president Ernesto Samper made a particular challenge to the head of the Liberal party César Gaviria through his Twitter account: if Federico Gutiérrez, former candidate of the Team for Colombia, lost in the first presidential round this May 29 against the liberal caucus that supported Gustavo Petro, he had to ‘leave’ the party to allow the other militants to join the campaign of the Historic Pact.

“Former President Gaviria at the fiquista political machinery fairpresented, with a pink flag, his. I challenge Gaviria: if Fico Gutiérrez loses and the Liberal bases that support Gustavo Petro win, leave the Liberal Party and return them to him so they can rebuild it,” Samper stressed in the trill.

After Petro’s victory in the first round, followed by Rodolfo Hernández (League of Anticorruption Leaders), the two candidates will meet in the faces in the second electoral round, summoning Colombians to the polls next June 19. Despite the fact that the leader of Human Colombia obtained more than two and a half million votes from the engineer, there are doubts about the new sectors that the former mayor of Bogotá could conquer to ensure the presidency of the Republic.

You may be interested in: Petro and Gustavo Bolívar assure that Rodolfo Hernández appropriated presidential proposals of the Historical Pact< /b>

In the midst of this panorama, Ernesto Samper presented a new proposal to César Gaviria with the second round in mind: an invitation to dialogue in the coming days so that the Liberals join the Historical Pact< /b>. This was announced in the last few hours through his Twitter account:

“President Gaviria: I invite you to meet this week with the liberal teams of the campaigns we support, let us accompany the Historical Pact and set a date for a Liberal Refoundation Congress, in which you and I step aside in favor of new leaders. Liberals,” Samper said.

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The truth is that, in principle, both politicians have different positions. While Samper has shown closeness to the Petro campaign, Gaviria announced weeks ago that he would join the Team for Colombia coalition to support ‘Fico’ Gutiérrez in the first round. Now, with the panorama defined between two candidates, it will be a matter of time to find out if the Liberal leaderaccepts such approaches or not, the same ones he had with Petro before joining the right-wing campaign.

Previously, Samper had harshly criticized Gaviria, whom he accused of ‘handing over’ the Liberal party to Uribeism and violating the Statutes. “He did it more for judicial and bureaucratic reasons than for programmatic ones. If it were for the latter, he would speak of peace, social justice and adjustments to the economic model”, added the former president at the time”

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Gaviria and Samper were the last two politicians to reach the presidency of Colombia with Liberal party flags. The former prevailed in the 1990 elections, after defeating the conservative leader Álvaro Gomez Hurtado at the polls; while the latter did the same in 1994, beating Andrés Pastrana, of the Conservative party, in the second round.

De Looking ahead to the final stretch of the elections, Petro already has the support of several liberal congressmen, who joined him at the end of April. Senators Diego Echavarría, Iván Agudelo, Julián Bedoya andLuis Fernando Velasco, and the representatives to the Chamber, María Eugenia Lopera, Dolcey Oscar Torres, José Luis Correa, Hernán Estupiñán and Luciano Grisales are some of them.