- Gerhard Lissard
- BBC News World
54 minutes
Image copyrightAFP
The news went around the world: Gustavo Petro is the first elected left-wing president in Colombia’s history. But what kind of left does it represent exactly?
In Sunday’s second round of presidential elections, Petro got 50.44% of the vote against 47.31% of his opponent, construction magnate Rodolfo Hernández, with more than 99.99% of the tables tallied.
“What’s coming is real change,” predicted the 62-year-old economist and former guerrilla fighter in his first public speech after his election.
Petro is the latest case of a Latin American left who came to power on a wave of social dissatisfaction with the political class, inequality and economic stagnation.
As of 2020, this list also includes Luis Arce in Bolivia, Pedro Castillo in Peru, Xiomara Castro in Honduras, and Gabriel Boric in Chile.
These and other leaders of the region congratulated the newly elected Colombian president on Sunday.
“Gustavo Petro’s victory is historic. Colombia’s conservatives have always been stubborn and tough,” Mexican President, also a leftist, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, said in a tweet thread.
However there big differences under these rulers.
Since he was elected mayor of Bogotá in 2011, comparisons of Petro to other left-wing leaders in the region have surfaced.
Now that he is assuming the presidency of Latin America’s third most populous country, the question of Petro’s place on the political spectrum becomes even more relevant.
How AMLO?
Petro fought in the urban and nationalist guerrillas of the M-19 through the decades of the ’70s and ’80s, a past for which many campaigned to link him to the radical left.
However the M-19 Demobilized in 1990, and in this, his third attempt at the presidency, Petro presented himself as a moderate politician after he was a senator.
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Gustavo Petro was elected President of Colombia at the third attempt.
“The moderation in some of his proposals has led to him being viewed by a section of the citizenry as a centre-left candidate rather than the radical left,” says Patricia Muñoz Yi, director of postgraduate courses in political science at Javeriana University in Bogotá. to BBC World.
In fact, Petro has denied that Colombia needs to transition to socialism and that he intends to resort to confiscation of private property or constitutional reforms to win re-election, as other left-wing Latin American presidents have done.
But he suggested change the country’s economic systemReduction of the exploitation of natural resources, an agrarian reform to end unproductive large estates and provide jobs in the state for those who cannot find them in the private sector.
Petro shows sympathy for the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and many of his opponents who also seek to associate him with him, but has distanced himself from Chavez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro.
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Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has been labeled a “dictator” by Petro.
“If you ask me if Chavez was a dictator, I’ll say no. If you ask me if Maduro is a dictator today, I’ll say yes,” Petro told Newsweek magazine in 2018.
The President-elect of Colombia has named leftists like former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva or Ecuadorian Rafael Correa as speakers.
See others again Similarities with the current Mexican Presidentknown by his initials AMLO.
Petro “comes from a nationalist and anti-imperialist left-wing tradition, perhaps a little similar to the one that inspires López Obrador in Mexico,” Yann Basset, a professor of political science at Bogotá’s Universidad del Rosario, told BBC Mundo.
And he adds that Petro “has an aggressive style, with sometimes populist speeches, which generates a lot of resistance and fears that he will have a government with slightly authoritarian traits, again in the style of what is happening in Mexico”.
Image rights owned by the Mexican government
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Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador publicly supported Petro at the end of the Colombian election campaign.
López Obrador, 68, became Mexico’s first left-wing president in seven decades in 2018.
And this month, AMLO caused controversy by supporting Petro and declaring that he faces a “dirty war” like what happened to himself in Mexico, something the Colombian foreign ministry has described as “meddling” in the country’s affairs .
How Boric?
On the other hand, there are also similarities between the way Petro achieves the presidency of Colombia and the way Boric made it in Chile in December.
And both won their elections afterwards social outbursts who, according to analysts, are showing a weariness towards the establishment and the economic model of their countries.
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Some see similarities between the context in which Gabriel Boric came to power in Chile and the way Petro is doing it in Colombia.
Petro and Boric promised structural reforms to ensure peace, with the state at the heart of their social, economic, and environmental projects.
with the choice France Marquez As vice president — the first black, feminist and environmentalist to take office — Petro showed a willingness to tackle issues of gender, race and climate from a younger left, like the one represented by Boric, Basset notes.
And he adds that this came despite tensions Petro’s campaign had with feminist sectors, who accused him of surrounding himself with “old guard” politicians with a macho vision.
On social issues, the President-elect of Colombia has also defended women’s access to abortion and promised to guarantee the right to diversity of sexual orientation.
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Colombia’s vice-president-elect, Francia Márquez, brought a breath of fresh air to Petro’s campaign.
That and his idea of ending the prohibitionist use of drugs brought him closer to figures such as the former Uruguayan president Jose Mujica, a different ex-guerrilla than other more traditional leftists in the region.
But of course one is the election proposal and the other is the way in which government is governed, especially in a polarized country with clear power balances.
Adam Isaacson, Colombia expert at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), believes it is still uncertain what kind of leftist ruler Petro will be after he takes office in August.
“Petro’s personality,” he explains. “Whether he will resist controls on his power, or will he be more like Boric, Mujica, or Lula and loosen his grip on the power a bit.”
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