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BOGOTA, Colombia – Colombians on Sunday gave leadership to a left-wing presidential candidate for the first time in the country’s history, a vote that paved the way for an unusual run-off between two populist and anti-establishment candidates which promised a radical change in the third game. largest nation in Latin America.
Gustavo Petro, a 62-year-old senator and former left-wing guerrilla, had a wave of support from young and poor voters frustrated by high levels of unemployment, inflation and violence in one of the most unequal societies in the region. With the preliminary count almost complete, Petro had won about 40 percent of the vote in Sunday’s first round, well below the majority he needed to become president.
Instead, he will face in a second round on June 19 a foreign candidate who catapulted to the polls at the last minute: Rodolfo Hernandez, a cheeky 77-year-old engineer and wealthy businessman who is committed to eliminating corruption and has made comparisons with former U.S. President Donald Trump. Hernandez, a former mayor of the middle city of Bucaramanga, got about 28 percent of the vote.
Hernandez claimed a four-point lead over Federico Gutierrez, the center-right candidate and former mayor of Medellin seen by many as a continuation of incumbent President Ivan Duque. Until recently, it was highly anticipated that Gutierrez would compete against Petro in a second round.
Now, in a country historically led by the political elite, Colombians will choose between two candidates who are far from it. One of them is a former left-wing rebel insulted for a long time by the establishment in a conservative country that is still in an armed conflict. The other is a wild card businessman who was once suspended as mayor for slapping a councilor. Gutierrez announced Sunday night that he will support Hernandez in the second round. Analysts predict it could be a tight race.
“Today, the winner has been a country that does not want to continue one more day with the same people, the same people who have led us to the painful situation we are in today,” Hernandez said in a video. Address. “Colombia has won today.”
It will be a kind of unprecedented presidential election in Colombia. But it follows a pattern in a region ravaged by the economic downturn during the pandemic: voters are fed up with incumbent governments who feel they have failed to meet the needs of the people. They are desperate for something different and they are getting it.
In Peru, rising poverty helped push rural Marxist and neophyte political master Pedro Castillo to the presidency last year. In Chile, the region’s free market model, voters chose former student activist Gabriel Boric, 36, this year. And in Brazil, the largest country in Latin America, former left-wing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is leading the polls to oust President Jair Bolsonaro in October.
“There is a desire everywhere to punish those in power,” said Alberto Vergara, a political scientist at the University of the Pacific in Peru. This is especially true in Colombia, where more than half of the population suffers from food insecurity, 40% live in poverty and 78% said in a recent poll that their country was moving in the wrong direction.
“It didn’t start two years ago, it started 200 years ago,” said Marta Bautista, 59, who lined up to vote Sunday in a working-class area of Suba, north of Bogota. “The same people have been at the forefront, the same people have been stealing from us.”
He talked about the hardware store of his son-in-law who has struggled to stay afloat. He began to cry as he described how much harder it had become for many to eat, to afford a pound of meat that has doubled in the last two years. “I hurt my country, I hurt my kids, I hurt my grandchildren,” he said. “I want a change.”
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“Change” was the word heard again and again at the polls in the Colombian capital on Sunday. For Bautista and many others on the line, change could only come with a presidency of Petro. But others, such as 50-year-old nurse Tibisay Contreras, saw this change in Hernandez.
“It’s not the same as always,” Contreras said of the outside candidate. He was afraid of Petro, whose policies he considered too radical. “Rodolfo has never been part of the political machine. I want to try someone different, someone who is not corrupt. “
According to analysts, Hernandez could be a formidable threat to Petro in the second round. Both candidates will be forced to try to attract voters from the establishment they campaigned against. While addressing a platform that attacks corruption among the political elite, Hernandez will have to reclaim right-wing voters and “all that means, with the entire political class behind it,” said Yann Basset, a political scientist at the Rosary University of Bogota. Petro, meanwhile, will have to prove he is part of a “reasonable change.”
As a longtime politician, senator and former mayor of Bogota, will Petro suddenly become the establishment’s candidate? Alfonso Prada, Petro’s chief of staff, said on Saturday that the campaign would focus on connecting Hernandez with the conservative political establishment that would likely gather around him. On Sunday night, some prominent members of Duque’s party were already announcing their support for the former mayor of Bucaramanga.
Sunday’s vote followed the most tense and volatile election cycle in more than a decade. Election observers recorded more than 580 acts of violence against political and social leaders before the election. Weeks before the vote, the Gulf Clan cartel closed much of the country’s rural north in retaliation for the extradition of its leader to the United States. Recent assassination threats against Petro and his formula mate, Francia Márquez, led campaigns to bolster security.
On Sunday, representatives of several campaigns expressed concern over what they considered election irregularities, raising fears that a losing candidate could question the legitimacy of the June election results.
Last year, Colombian cities erupted in mass protests for months, initially in response to a controversial tax reform. Police responded with brutal force, killing at least two dozen people. Many on the street were young people like Alejandra Sandoval, a 19-year-old Soacha food student.
“We had expected more change, less violence and less deaths,” Sandoval said. On Sunday, she ran in her first presidential election, hoping a vote for Petro would bring about a change in Colombia that protesters like her had long been calling for.
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For decades, elections here focused on the central theme of war. But this year, security is at the bottom of the list of voters’ priorities, according to Silvia Otero, a political scientist at Rosario University in Colombia. Many voters have more immediate concerns, such as the economy, inequality and corruption.
Petro is committed to transforming an unequal society through redistributive policies such as universal free higher education and a minimum wage for single mothers. He says it would raise taxes on the 4,000 richest Colombians. It proposes ending new oil exploration and advancing the country towards renewable energy. Imagine a country, and a “progressive axis” in the region, built on industrialization rather than the extraction of natural resources. “Latin America needs a new agenda,” he told The Washington Post.
His candidacy has caused panic among the Colombian conservative political and financial establishment. Some warn that Petro’s presidency will strain relations with the United States. Others say he will not be able to keep his promises with a divided legislature.
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Hernandez, meanwhile, offers an alternative that appeals to both Petro and the establishment. He is known by some as “the engineer of Santander” and by others as the “old man of TikTok”, a popular former mayor of the city of Bucaramanga. As mayor, he managed to eliminate some key sources of corruption in the city. But he is also known for making shocking comments. During an interview in 2016, he described himself as “a follower of a great German thinker, Adolf Hitler.” He later said that he confused Hitler with Albert Einstein.
Hernandez rejects the right-wing label but has accepted the support of conservative voters. Asked by The Post about comparisons with former President Donald Trump, he laughed. He they acknowledged that they share a tendency to be “direct.”
He seemed uncertain when asked about specific policies. Pressed on whether to support aerial fumigation or manual eradication of coca, the cocaine base plant, he replied that he had to look for which was cheaper. He argued that it was not necessary for a president to know every department of the country well, “because everyone who knows, what did they do? Where have they taken the country? “
Hernandez predicted he would win because his fervent base knows he is “the only one capable of pulling thieves out of power.” He then described his effect on followers as “messianic” and compared them to the “brainwashed” kidnappers of September 11, 2001, who destroyed the Twin Towers.
When asked if comparing his supporters to terrorists was problematic, he rejected the premise. “What I’m comparing is that after you get into that state, you don’t change position. You don’t change it.”
Diana Durán contributed to this report.