The right-wing opposition claims that Gustavo Petro’s government is communist, while the president’s supporters say it is leftist. This is heard from his supporters on social networks, from professionals who identify themselves as leftists and from members of the Historical Pact.

However, it is very difficult to define President Gustavo Petro. His macroeconomic policy is orthodox, furiously neoliberal, he only wants to please risk rating agencies and international organizations, especially the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

In cultural values, it is progressive woke. In social matters, he promises reforms, but they are not always clear and not necessarily leftist. For example, the pension reform is an attack against the middle and professional classes, contrary to what his supporters and union bureaucracies say.

You may be interested in: Dollar in Colombia starts trading lower after Nicolás Petro’s strong statements

In the energy field, he is influenced by European ideas. In the international arena, it is making some lurches, opening diplomatic relations with Venezuela -which is correct-, but it tries to get along with the United States in the war of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Russia.

In this sense, the current policy of Gustavo Petro’s government continues to be glued to NATO, U.S.-managed radars continue along the border with Venezuela, while the government continues without denouncing or asking to reform the Free Trade Agreement (FTA).

I could classify President Petro as a light social democrat, that is, a neoliberal with progressive aspects in the cultural and reformist in the social.

He is not anti-capitalist, because he does not propose to begin to break with this economic system but rather defends it; he does not speak of neoliberal anti-globalization and neither does he have proposals for real change.

It is what the Italian philosopher, Daniel Fusaro, calls a fuchsia left, that is to say, a faded left, a left of woke progressivism, such as that of Gabriel Boric of Chile, which has little left.

Fusaro says that, “today there is a kind of liberal totalitarianism that allows us to be right-wing liberals, left-wing liberals, center liberals, or, precisely in political and economic liberalism, in libertarian practice in customs and, of course, in Atlanticism in the geopolitical sphere. I believe that today we must rethink a recategorization of the political reality according to the high/low dichotomy or the elite/people categories”.

“Moreover, they, those in the system, create a kind of generalized micro-conflictuality that acts as a weapon of mass distraction and, we could also say, as a weapon of permanent mass division. On the one hand, it distracts from the capitalist contradiction that is no longer even mentioned and, on the other hand, so to speak, it divides the masses into homosexuals and heterosexuals, Muslims and Christians, vegans and carnivores, fascists and anti-fascists, and so on. And while this runs naturally, capital lets people take to the streets for gay pride, for animals and for everything, but does not dare to take to the streets to fight against wage slavery, against precariousness or against the capitalist economy! If so, there is repression, as happened in France with the yellow vests”.

You may also read: Colombia’s competitiveness fell: government inefficiency and poor business infrastructure among main reasons

“Yes, in essence, Gramsci is the opposite of what the left is doing in Italy and in much of Europe, the left is no longer red but fuchsia, no longer the hammer and sickle but the rainbow. They fight for capital and not for labor, they fight for liberal cosmopolitanism and not for the internationalism of the working classes”.

Fusaro insists that the political axis should not be ‘left’ or ‘right’, but of those above and those below. He also insists that ideologically it is necessary to be conservative in terms of values -rootedness, loyalty, family, ethic, homeland- and left-wing in terms of emancipation, democratic socialism, dignity of labor.

On the other hand, Gustavo Petro has always said that he is not a leftist, and we must believe him. In a certain way, indirectly what he defends is a capitalism with a human face. To make reforms to defend capitalism and modernize it.

He talks a lot about agrarian reform, but, in truth, what he is proposing is not an agrarian reform of land distribution to make rural property more egalitarian.

What he is proposing is to give land that the government owns, or that landowners want to sell at good prices, to peasants. That is why the president of Fedegán is there, because he understands very well that this is not about making a true agrarian reform that breaks with the latifundia and harms the landowners.

Curious, but no protests are heard from the big landowners. What a curious agrarian reform that the rich landowners remain silent when we have been fighting for this situation of agrarian inequity since independence!

Colombia Humana, Gustavo Petro’s party, is nothing, it has no organization, no statutes or doctrine, there is a lot of everything, a lot of ex-militants of the M-19, which as we know was not leftist.

The Historical Pact is a jumble of parties, groups, characters, of all kinds of tendencies, without any coherence at the moment of governing and taking advantage of power.

For all these reasons, it seems to me very wrong to say that we are in the presence of a leftist government, which seems to me dangerous, because it discredits the true nature of the left.

This is what is happening in Europe. All the socialist or social democratic parties are a fiasco and that is why the right is winning.

How attractive is a Pedro Sanchez, warmonger, globalist, otanist, traitor to Eastern Sahara, subject of the United States, neoliberal in economic matters; or Chancellor Olaf Scholtz of Germany, another warmonger, traitor to his country and neoliberal; or Neil Kammer, the Labour leader who attacked Jeremy Corbyn’s leader and his tendency, persecuted them and has ostracized them; or Tsipras, of Greece’s Syriza coalition, who surrendered to the IMF and the European Commission, and betrayed his ideas.

I could mention more European leaders, of these so-called “socialists and social democrats”, who make it embarrassing to call themselves leftists. These who abandoned all their ideals, who converted to globalism and otanism (pro-Ottomanism), who became warmongers, who adopted neo-liberalism and forgot their popular bases, who became parties of elites.

That is why the popular classes, the workers, the middle classes have turned and have gone to parties of the right or extreme right that attract them with siren songs.

For me, a government that follows all the mandates of the IMF, that only speaks of fiscal rule, of macroeconomic stability, of raising fuel prices as demanded by the international organizations and the Colombian orthodoxy, cannot be of the left.

Keep reading: Commercial war between the United States and China: could these powers break off their commercial relations?

That is why the international agencies are no longer so critical of Gustavo Petro’s government, because they realized that it was not the tiger they were painting it to be.

But, yes, experience shows that the country that follows IMF mandates goes to hell. But, now, our pseudo leftists remain silent, they say nothing about the economic policy, the exaggerated increase in fuel, energy and public services prices.

I will put it this way: if what has been done in the first semester of 2023 with the price of gasoline (an increase of 44.41% until July 2023) had taken place in the governments of Santos, Duque or Uribe, these same ones who are silent -the union bureaucracies, the supposed leftists- would have already set the country on fire with strikes, protests and riots.

The best thing that can happen to the system is that a government that claims to be leftist or progressive takes unpopular measures, even measures that harm the population so that it does not protest. I share Diego Fusaro’s ideas about what we have is a fuchsia left, in faded red, that does not attack capital. And, in several aspects, what is called progressive woke, which divides citizens, not if they are exploited, not if they are from below or above, but if they are Afro, indigenous, LGTBI, gypsies, radical feminists. Thus the concept of citizenship, of Republic, that we are all Colombian citizens, all with equal rights and duties, but that there is a minority, an elite, with all the benefits and 99 percent dominated, exploited, with a precarious life, simply an object of consumption, is lost.

The International Context of the Medium-Term Fiscal Framework