One lesson from the first round of the presidential election is that most Colombians prefer anything – literally anything – to continuity.
Federico “Fico” Gutiérrez, the government candidate, the clans and the heaviest “machinery” were therefore punished mercilessly. As Sergio Fajardo never knew how to embody the spirit of change, his failure was resounding and, of course, well deserved.
Gustavo Petro and Rodolfo Hernández were then left. Both, in their own way, are change. After the elections, and in view of the difficult scenario for the second round of Petrismo, now many want to see in “Rodolfo” the plan C of uribismo and a simple scenario, once again, of the left against the right.
I believe they are wrong. Let me explain.
Hernández can now receive support from uribismo. In fact, he has already received the blessing of Paloma Valencia and María Fernanda Cabal. Without a doubt, uribismo will play for “Rodolfo”. This does not mean, however, that Hernández was, from the beginning, a buried Uriba record. It lacks much more organic links with these networks and their resources.
The Uriba government mobilized, with complete impudence, in favor of Fico and never of Hernández. In the language of a great statesman, the latter referred to Iván Duque, among other heavy pronouncements, as “that son of a… who ruined us.”
Their votes are largely against the corruption of a Uriba government. The continuity token was the mediocre Fico and has already left the board. The message of “Rodolfo”, sincere or not, has a lot of “anti-establishment” and, due to its regional origin, “anti-centralism” and “anti-elitism”. Through it all, he got where he is.
The fact that now, in the second round scenario, Hernández must turn as a friend to his adversary’s enemies is not enough to label him as having already been what he will probably become in the immediate future. The good news of May 29, excluding the new chapters of this story, is that uribismo, and the entire “establishment”, suffered a fulminating electoral defeat.
The 14.5 million votes for Petro and Rodolfo are votes against a hegemonic project and a way of doing politics that are extremely worn out. The majority are fed up with the Uriba right and the “machinery”.
In a nutshell: it’s one thing how “Rodolfo” will have to tacitly align himself with what he said he hates in order to win, and another thing is because it’s him, not Fico, who has become Petro’s competitor. Hernández, for voters, represents a change from the Uriba right-wing project.
Now, given that “change” is a neutral term with multiple possible directions, the question is what it could mean to supporters of Hernández and how to describe this colorful character on the ideological spectrum. Some conceptual distinctions are relevant here.
In his well-worn book Right and Left, Norberto Bobbio introduces a useful distinction between two types of center: the center as “included third” and as “inclusive third”.
The first represents fajardismo with its “neither one nor the other”. Here the center is defined as “third” because of its equidistance from the extremes or its “warmth”. The second is the center as a “synthesis” of the two with their “both one and the other”.
Hernández, from my point of view, embodies the latter type. “Rodolfo” represents, on the one hand, the patriarchal and authoritarian country and, on the other hand, the anti-corruption, pro-peace and anti-inequality country that, hand in hand, now, with an astute businessman, intends to catch up with its social debt. .
This is not about exploring neutrality, but about integrating the extremes. The task is in charge of an old “fox”, corner, vulgar, populist and, by Colombian standards, “bonachón”.
If we look, for example, at the history and ideologues of the conservative revolution in pre-Hitler Germany, we find that these were not simply right-wing movements.
The “red-baiting” attitudes and the idea of ”national-bolshevism”, represented by authors such as Moeller van den Bruck, Ernst Niekisch or Karl Otto Paetel, undoubtedly aimed to crush communism from an authoritarian and nationalist perspective, but at the same time welcomed popular mobilization and, above all, their demands for social justice
The official denomination of Nazism, namely “National Socialism”, reveals this hybridization of the right and the left within the anti-elitist cult of the “people”. “Das deutsche Volk…” Hitler shouted repeatedly. The center was again referred to as the “superior third” or “inclusive”.
I am not arguing here something as foolish as that Rodolfo Hernández is a Nazi, but that his behavior, unlike the dichotomous world of a certain Petrism, is not simply right-wing.
Perhaps when Hernández claimed to be a “follower” of the “great German thinker Adolf Hitler” (and then apologized with the strange excuse that he was thinking of Einstein), he was unconsciously revealing his vague intention to amalgamate, in a Colombian key, the virtues of left and right.
Returning to the point: change, in “Rodolfo’s” terms, is the integration of the authoritarian-patriarchal mentality with elements of a progressive and (discursively) anti-elitist agenda through “managerial skill”.
It sounds strange, but it’s not far-fetched. It seems unlikely, but the improbable is also real. Ideological coherence is not an important criterion for effective collective desires. What is important in this context is to condense desires.
Petro, however, represents for the electorate only the progressive agenda: rights of ethnic and sexual minorities, listening to peasant struggles, fighting the extractive economic model, sympathy with the student movement and the young people of the communities murdered in the first half of 2021, etc.
Many Colombians, however, want a new paterfamilia, equally angry, but refined, without serious guilt and, at the same time, a leader with social sensitivity and capable of reaching, also with anger, the “establishment. This is “Rodolfo”. the change has a novelty part and a “restoration” part, with its updated repetition of the original.
Defeating Hernández means, for Petro, undermining the credibility of the left side of his integrative centrism and exploiting to the maximum the inconsistency between an anti-corruption discourse and the de facto support of corrupt political blocs.
But Petro loses, in any case, in a cultural terrain that is difficult to modify and diffused: that of our still predominant representations of “authority”.
Politics, however, is a matter of tactics and strategy. Nothing is predefined. Petro still has three weeks to better market his move option and make timely alliances.
Translation of Giulia Gaspar
