The story of the last week of the Colombian election sounds like the repetition of a plot increasingly common in liberal democracies. Faced with the imminent victory of the left, led by moderate Gustavo Petro, the right rebels and exchanges a moderate opponent for a populist one.
Who plays this role is the oligarch-jester Rodolfo Hernández. He overtook Federico “Fico” Gutiérrez, the young liberal supported by all parties of the traditional right, and reached the second round against Petro with a lightning campaign that takes up the original recipe of the populists: anti-corruption demagoguery, angry anti-communism and ostensible use of social media. .
The passage to the second round raises the tension of the presidential elections. All candidates circulate around the country accompanied by military escorts, and assassination threats are reported daily.
Petro knows that all the tension revolves around his candidacy. His biography reflects Colombia’s long road to peace. The former member of the M-19 guerrilla had a successful passage through institutional politics, serving as senator and mayor, before building the first platform of progressive parties capable of winning the presidential elections.
The veteran knew how to explore the changes brought about by the 2016 peace agreement. Since then, Marxist guerrillas have ceased to be a burden for the left, and Petro has finally managed to organize this election around issues that mobilize the popular classes, such as inequality and the welfare state. A sign of strength for his coalition, he recently handed over the keys to his campaign to Alfonso Prada, former secretary to the presidency of Juan Manuel Santos, the conservative architect of the historic process.
Petro’s candidacy also builds on the failure of the traditional right. The current president, Iván Duque, elected in 2018 by those who opposed the peace pact, lost control of the country during the pandemic, marked by violent protests and huge human losses among the most vulnerable.
In a position of strength to unite the right and regain some of the anti-system votes, Hernández has everything to be a much stronger rival than Gutierrez in the second round against Petro.
Unfortunately, political instability overshadows the quality of the programmatic debate. While Hernández is best known for confounding Albert Einstein and Adolf Hitler, Petro’s proposals place him at the forefront of the Latin American left. Its security policy involves breaking the collusion between organized crime and the political elite, which has haunted the country since the 1980s, promoting a paradigm inversion in the control of illicit substances.
He also proposes halting oil and gas exploration, anathema to developmentalists, and does not hesitate to draw a parallel between Duque’s right-wing government and that of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.
He only has to fulfill half of his program to usher in a new era in Latin America. But who really inspires the future of Colombia is his deputy, Francia Márquez, black, feminist, ecologist and of overwhelming courage. In a dispute between political professionals, the real change is her.
