Gustavo Petro is the first left-wing president in the country’s history. It was written by Francia Márquez, the first black woman vice president. The Historic Pact candidate was running for the third time for the presidency of a country always ruled by the conservative elite, which has again tried to halt its rise, but the desire for change has been stronger. Colombia is entering a new political era.
Along the way he defeated the right and the continuity, embodied in the first round by Fico Gutiérrez. As if that wasn’t enough, in the second round he faced Rodolfo Hernández, a real estate entrepreneur with an aggressive discourse against corruption and the ruling political class. He made rudeness and the elementary a capital of political sympathy. Hernández arrived with a populist engine that seemed unstoppable. Petro himself didn’t know how to face him in the first week of the second round. In the end, his strategy was to focus on Hernandez and his shortcomings as an impulsive and aggressive man. The result proves him right.
The campaign was exhausting. Petro against everyone, again. Fico received support from businessmen and traditional parties. That was his strength and ultimately his ballast. Continuity, same as always, was stillborn. Citizens demanded a change. Petro represented him from the left, but sociology failed to interpret that discontent is not just a progressive issue. Many of these unbelievers supported Rodolfo Hernández.
Petro suddenly had to face someone whose ascension engine was the same as him. The politician, used to fighting back, had to change his speech. Faced with a man who is unaware of some of the basic functions of the state and who sees the entire bureaucracy as a burden, Petro wanted to represent a sensible change, not a leap into the void. At the beginning of the second half he started with a disadvantage because Rodolfo had jumped on the wave of innovations. Everything that became known about him was surprising and attractive. He made a $100 million fortune in a small town, Piedecuesta, which is in a corner of the country. He won the mayoralty of his region’s capital, Bucaramaga, without the support of any party, using only his capital and the ideas of a younger philosopher brother. The speech was simple: the system was broken and he was going to clean it up like he was a character from Gotham. Most of the work was done in the slums. He installed synthetic soccer fields with giant screens and cable television so the little ones could watch the World Cup games. When he left office in 2019, his popularity was over 80%.
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Now Petro has faced this wave of populism that has its roots in the same sense of disaffection with the establishment that made Donald Trump President of the United States, that led to Brexit, the ‘no’ to peace in Colombia’s referendum and the rise of the extreme right in Europe. Having finished with his historical enemies’ options, Petro had to face the historical moment. The hardest thing so far. In the first week of the campaign he looked defeated. Hernández began scoring over 50% in almost every poll. Petrophobia, which outweighed irrational fear of his coming to power and everything that smacks left. Hernández was also a nice and innovative candidate.
It was a matter of taking a closer look. Videos of his eruptions began to circulate. Sexist, homophobic and racist comments. When he first saw the polls, these were not necessarily negative positions for some of his voters. Fed up with political corruption, Hernández said publicly what many thought privately. Woman was not created to rule; Venezuelan immigrants are factories to create poor children. A video of him hitting an opposition councilor went viral again. He has blasphemed the Virgin on a TV show, which has cost him a dislike: he has spent the last week visiting shrines with a gesture of repentance.
The campaign began to drag on. The videos that emerged of Petro’s advisors’ discussions gave him pause. Those footage did not include what Petro’s advisers call a traumatic event: a clip in which he was seen saying something criminal or a serious outburst. The images show his advisors speaking bluntly about how they can destroy their opponents’ image. It revealed nothing that someone behind the scenes isn’t imagining, but it cast a cloak of suspicion on the campaign. There Hernández tied the contest and both contestants went shoulder to shoulder last week.
The ghost debate came. Petro, adept at discussion, wanted a face-to-face meeting with Hernández, which would lead to that. The strategists of the former mayor of Bucaramanga did not want to expose themselves to something like this: their candidate is optimistic and foul-mouthed and easily loses his composure. A court in Bogotá ordered a face-to-face meeting to be held. Petro celebrated, Hernández hid. That hit his image of a man who was thrown without fear of anything. A meme became popular in which he was seen hiding under the bed.
So Petro went into the final stretch with an advantage. “We won,” announced his campaign manager at the end of the elections. The Count agreed with him an hour later. The polls showed Petro’s ultimate victory.