Leftist Gustavo Petro confirmed his favoritism at the polls during Colombia’s elections this Sunday (29), but he finds himself challenged by the need to garner more votes until the second round of elections, in three weeks’ time. The populist Rodolfo Hernández, his opponent, is in a more favorable scenario in this regard.
Petro, who was a guerrilla and former mayor of the capital Bogotá, obtained 40.32% — or 8.5 million — of the valid votes. Local analysts question whether this would not be the candidate’s vote cap, that is, the maximum support he can garner in the elections.
Hernández, who won 28.15% — or 5.9 million — of the votes, has seen his base grow, with candidates defeated at the polls expressing support for the businessman in a country whose national policy is traditionally marked by the presence of politicians on the right. .
Third place in the first round, Federico “Fico” Gutiérrez, for example, has already expressed support for Hernández. Candidate of the situation, he got 23.91% of the votes, just over 5 million. “We don’t want to lose Colombia’s future, so we will vote for Rodolfo,” Fico said in the speech after acknowledging his defeat.
And he continued: “Gustavo Petro, for everything he has said and done, would be a danger to democracy, to freedoms, to the economy and to our families, our children”, followed the former mayor of Medellín, who was supported by the current government, of Iván Duque.
The fourth-placed, centrist Sergio Fajardo, stated that he has not yet made a decision, but that he spoke with Hernández after the election result. “From Petro’s side, nothing,” he said on a social network. “But we have to proceed calmly and wisely.”
Senator John Milton Rodríguez, strongly linked to the religious agenda, in turn, also said he has not yet made a decision on where he will place his support, but told local media that he completely rules out the possibility of supporting Petro. In addition to Hernández, he, who totaled 1.29%, or 274,000 votes, is considering a blank vote.
Lawyer Enrique Gomez, sixth in the first round with 0.23% of the votes, has already expressed support for the populist. “To stop the socialist dictatorship, we will not let them rob Colombia”, he justified in the official profile of a social network.
With this scenario, Petro is expected to seek new votes among the mass of those who abstained in the first round. About 45% of citizens eligible to vote did not turn up at the polls — around 18 million people. Although high, the number represents the lowest number of abstentions in two decades in Colombia, taking into account the first and second rounds of the presidential elections.
Much of Petro’s campaign was built on allegations that his candidacy acted as a brake on the traditional uribismo — the current led by the right-wing caudillo Álvaro Uribe. Now, however, his opponent is a political outsider, who is leading a strong anti-corruption speech in the country.
Sociologist Alexander Gamba, a professor at the Faculty of Sociology at the Santo Tomás University in Bogotá, told the AFP news agency that Petro would have to change his speech. “He has to stop asserting himself as the anti-elite candidate and show himself as the one who can defend democracy, because many of Hernández’s positions are openly anti-democratic,” he said.
A wealthy businessman in the construction sector, Hernández was mayor of Bucaramanga and comes from a poor background. He has already claimed to be an admirer of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, to later apologize and say that he was wrong and that, in fact, he meant Albert Einstein.
