Bogotá mayoral candidate Gustavo Bolívar makes statements at his campaign headquarters and accepts his defeat in the regional elections.Santiago Mesa
Neither the fame of his narconovelas nor the strength of Petrism was enough for Gustavo Bolívar. His rival, Carlos Fernando Galán, won the office of mayor of Bogota with an overwhelming majority, without the need for a second round. Bolívar was burdened by a negative image that he was unable to counteract during the election campaign, and the hand on his neck that Petro placed on him, obsessed with putting the construction of the subway at the center of the debate, which was also the case The case was obviously a burden for him. The candidate he had chosen himself. Had this been proposed as a presidential referendum, the result would be frankly devastating for the left.
The blow to the Historical Pact, the political movement around Petro, is very hard. The coalition was only able to field candidates nationwide due to the difficult internal relations between the various forces that make up it and the rapid decline in the popularity of the Colombian president. There was no way to find consensus candidates. One of the few chips was Bolívar, one of his most loyal supporters. “I am his apostle,” he often says. However, the plan didn’t work. The two went down hand in hand in Bogotá.
Petro wanted to place someone he completely trusted in the country’s capital, especially after the disagreements he had with current mayor Claudia López last year. It has continued the construction of the elevated subway planned and contracted by the previous mayor Enrique Peñalosa. However, the president wants to reverse and bury the project because it works in almost all major cities in the world. He even traveled to Beijing to meet with Xi Jinping to help him persuade the Chinese companies building it to back down.
The president’s intentions may be laudable, but it was not the right time to bring up the discussion while Bolívar was risking everything. The writer spent half of the campaign simultaneously saying that he would not stop the work and raising the president’s objections. With God and with the devil. When he did poorly in the polls last week, he even went to a notary to testify that there would be no delays in construction work. It was a clear way to distance himself from the president’s speech, but it was already too late and sounded like a desperate move. In the end he came third behind Juan Daniel Oviedo, who scored one and a half points and 43,000 votes.
The left has derailed into a progressive fiefdom. Petro won the mayoralty in 2011 with 721,000 votes (Galán received almost one and a half million votes) and from here built the national projection that led him to the presidency. Claudia López, feminist, lesbian, also represented a disruptive option and it does not sound unreasonable that in three years she would be a candidate to succeed Petro. The terrain therefore seemed fertile for a candidate who campaigned with a refreshing speech but who never connected with the electorate.
It must be said that Bolívar is the candidate who suffered the most attacks during the election campaign. Petrophobia is more evident than ever. His rivals, particularly those on the right, have expressed support for the young people on the front lines – he gave them helmets and goggles to prevent them from losing their eyesight from rubber balls thrown by police – and said so often They knowingly misinterpreted and ensured that as mayor he would pay a million pesos to the boys who did not commit crimes. It was intended to distort his speech, in line with the attacks that Petro received during the presidential election campaign, where he was accused of being a guerrilla and authoritarian. In the debates, Bolívar often had to respond to exaggerated attacks from other candidates, some of whom didn’t even have the slightest chance, like former defense minister and Uribista candidate Diego Molano.
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The failure is more than obvious. Bolívar joined the Historic Pact at Petro’s invitation after they exchanged messages on social networks. Petro, a very astute voter, believed that he had found a continuity of his project in this self-made man who rose from poverty and achieved great success. But all the negative factors have combined to derail a candidacy that initially sounded hopeful, but in the long run has become another drag on the president, who hasn’t received enough good news lately.
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