One: The Colombian left, led by Gustavo Petro, obtained the best result in its history in the first electoral round.
So much so that, in a context of high participation for Colombia (55%), the Historic Pact, which brings together all the progressive forces in the country, obtained more than eight and a half million votes.
A figure that even surpasses the second round of the 2018 presidential elections and that consolidates the maxim that the former mayor of Bogotá is the candidate to beat.
Two: Uribismo consummates its particular process of decay. Since 2010, after two consecutive presidencies of Álvaro Uribe, the candidate he nominated guaranteed his presence in the second round of elections.
However, for years the image of the main proponent of the Democratic Security Policy has been losing ground. The messianic image of the past has given way to a figure blurred by excess, dogmatism and manipulation.
To this must be added the discredit of Iván Duque, without a government agenda in these four years and with approval ratings that just a few months ago barely reached 25%.
Three: Sergio Fajardo is the big loser. Just four years ago he was on the verge of reaching the second round of elections, being surpassed by a narrow margin by Gustavo Petro.
If he had succeeded, given the electoral volatility in his favor, by occupying the space of ideological moderation, he could possibly have reached the presidency of Colombia.
However, his candidacy emerged from a deeply fractured coalition of names, with clashing personalities, and which developed a gray campaign, without major proposals, with a lukewarm participation in the debates, as if at no time did Fajardo believe he was capable of reaching the second round. .
Four: Rodolfo Hernández is the big surprise. Their voting intentions in recent months have been more or less stable, between 10 and 12%.
His status as an “outsider” and defender of anti-politics in the face of elitist traditionalism enjoys a remarkable audience.
This is better ground than expected for a candidate who is a kind of Donald Trump à la “bomanguese”, who lacks government programming, who maintains a discourse of reductionist simplisms in the service of demagoguery and who finds echo on social networks. –especially Twitter and TikTok.
Five: The liberation that the Peace Agreement brought to the left is noted. For decades, the survival of the armed conflict caused a good part of the political-partisan structure to gravitate towards the cleavage that fueled the violence.
Thus, with the demobilization of the FARC-EP, the visibility and politicization of other aspects of the public agenda, such as education, health, housing and employment, gained importance.
This stirred up Colombian society, provoking broad scenarios of mobilization and protest and building the viability, as an alternative, of a democratic left to take the reins of the country.
Six: Colombian political culture is a sum of ingredients that, in one way or another, as well as allowing us to understand the height and popularity of Gustavo Petro, can help to understand how someone like Hernández reached the second round.
In many parts of Colombia, a parochial and conservative political culture still prevails, which traditionalist elitism did not know or want to understand.
Its excesses in the “patrimonialization” of the State, and the image of continuous looting, a product of corruption as endemic as it is clientelistic, provide an ideal setting for the anti-establishment and anti-corruption discourse that, demagogically, Hernández defends.
Seven: The circumstances of the second round are in Hernández’s favor. Uribismo and Federico Gutiérrez himself have already expressed their support for the candidacy of the former mayor of Bucaramanga.
All this, without negotiations or prior requests, knowing that any possibility better than Petro is the only one desirable for their interests.
Uribismo, the party machinery of the Liberal Party, the Conservative Party or the Cambio Radical, with great territorial anchorage, will favor Hernández, as will most of a media spectrum that continues to consider Petro the personification of Bolivarianism in Colombia.
Eight: Although for Petro the candidate who best served his interests was Federico Gutiérrez, all is not lost.
Naturally, he has to avoid the discourse that figures like Hernández motivate, insofar as his interventions arouse impulse, improvisation, little viability and easy insults.
In the face of anti-democratic demagoguery, the weapons must be different, as evidenced by the campaigns on the continent, from the United States to Brazil, passing through El Salvador.
It will be important to attract the vote from the center, the vote not mobilized in the first round, and prioritize the geographical enclaves, mostly peripheral, which together with Bogotá have supported the progressive and peace agenda since 2016.
Nine: In the coming days, it is to be expected that former presidents César Gaviria, Andrés Pastrana and Álvaro Uribe will take a stand with Hernández. About Iván Duque, his presence in the campaign will possibly be more astute than in the first round, in which he positioned himself on the side of Gutiérrez.
Among the former presidents, Petro has the guaranteed support of Ernesto Samper, but it remains to be seen what Juan Manuel Santos will do.
It is possible that an eventual endorsement on his part, added to that of other figures, such as Sérgio Fajardo, could mitigate Petro’s projection over part of the collective imagination and attract the moderate voter who initially, under other circumstances, would never vote for Petro.
Dez: Of course, Colombia has a lot at stake in these elections, and this is not a recurring maxim.
After four years of inaction, mismanagement and regression in most of the social or security indicators, the arrival of Hernández to the presidency must be understood as a threat to institutionality.
Petro is the only one that proposes a programmatic agenda that is coherent with the challenges of a Colombia that demands, among many other issues, greater public spending, better redistribution of resources and opportunities, greater institutional capacity in the territory and the return to a path of peace, completely blurred after Duque’s disastrous management.
