Daniel Quintero persists in launching his improbable presidential candidacy

Daniel Quintero insists on keeping afloat a presidential candidacy that many consider to be sinking. The media-rich former Medellín mayor announced Monday that he would run for the indigenous party AICO, despite legal doubts preventing him from doing so. “Today we are taking a big step. We are receiving support from the indigenous authorities of Colombia that will allow us to aspire to the presidency. We want to join and build a broad movement to reset politics,” he wrote in a social media post accompanied by a video in a maloca. “They tried to keep us from the path of the presidency, but they did not succeed. Now our goal is to transform this country and move forward,” he proclaims at the end of his message.

The Antioquian politician, known for his stunts and his noisy staging, had already announced at the end of October a new attempt to obtain a presidential candidacy, just a few hours after Senator Iván Cepeda authoritatively won the popular consultation of the Historic Pact, from which Quintero withdrew at the last minute. At the time, the former mayor intended to register through a signature committee, but the Civil Registry Office rejected this initiative because it believed it did not comply with legal requirements.

Since he participated in the Pact’s eventful consultation thanks to the blessing of President Gustavo Petro, until his unexpected last-minute departure, Quintero has been surrounded by one controversy after another. Very resisted in different sectors of progressivism, his face even appeared on maps, since it was impossible to reprint them in such a short time. His withdrawal threatened to color with uncertainty the promised unity of a left in which he was never active, but Cepeda consolidated himself as leader in December polls, which leaves the former mayor – for now – as a supporting player in the presidential race. His support is marginal and his name was not even included in the Invamer study, the most recent of the polls that place Cepeda as the favorite.

Against all odds, Quintero continued his campaign and insists he will run in next year’s elections. Legal doubts remain about the possibility of its landing in the so-called Broad Front, a coalition even broader than that of the historic Pact, still under construction. Or even that he can participate in the electoral cycle. This bloc of progressive and liberal forces is planning an interparty consultation in March to elect a single candidate, but several experts warn that Quintero could be disqualified after having previously registered for the left’s internal consultation.

Law 1475 of 2011 stipulates that the result of the consultations “will be obligatory” for the participants and that a pre-candidate is considered as such from the moment “his registration has become firm” as a candidate in the internal process, which in the case of Quintero had happened at the end of September. Even if he retired, according to this interpretation, he would be obliged to respect the result of the consultation in which Cepeda beat former Minister of Health Carolina Corcho – who is now head of the list for the Senate of the Historic Pact. The former mayor of Medellín, for his part, cites a lack of guarantees to justify his withdrawal.

Quintero’s new registration could once again be rejected by the Registrar’s Office, as happened in the case of the signatures, says Frey Muñoz, deputy director of the Electoral Observation Mission (MOE). “If it was not rejected, the revocation of registration could be requested before the National Electoral Council, due to the incapacity resulting from participation in the consultation,” explains the expert. “And if there were no refusals or revocations, the election could be claimed before the Council of State, in the event of an election,” he concludes.

Quintero’s flags

Along the way, the consultation of the Pact encountered all sorts of legal obstacles. Quintero, meanwhile, has managed to perfect the coups that made him popular on social media, a language he masters with a provocative style. Three of them, well known, brandished flags which aroused controversy for different reasons: that of Colombia, that of Palestine and that of the war until the death of Simón Bolívar.

First, he raised Colombia’s tricolor on the island of Santa Rosa de Loreto, in the middle of the Amazon River, the small territory that is at the center of a border conflict with Peru and that President Petro was trying to turn into a national cause. He later stormed the uninvited Colombian Business Congress in Cartagena and took the stage with a Palestinian flag. And later this was recorded in another video from the Boyacá Bridge, where he waved to death the controversial flag of the Bolivar War, a period of extreme violence in the Venezuelan war of independence that Petro usually claims despite criticism for invoking this discursive violence. None of these scenarios seems to have had a lasting effect.