Carlos Fernando Galán, a conciliatory mayor for Bogotá

Now yes, as his campaign slogan said. In his third attempt, Carlos Fernando Galán (Bogotá, 46 years old) has been the mayor of Bogotá since January 1, 2024, after having managed to regroup the political center to achieve a resounding victory with one and a half million votes in the elections. October elections. Victim, journalist and politician, in that order, the youngest of Luis Carlos Galán's children claims that his life project has been to work in the capital of Colombia, a city that he knows like few others even though he spent his adolescence in exile. , after the assassination of his father.

“Unfortunately, we are a country where violence has marked us all,” he conceded to this newspaper at the beginning of the campaign. His nascent Mayor's Office also marks the resurgence of New Liberalism, the party founded by his father. Luis Carlos Galán was a big favorite to become President on August 18, 1989, when he was shot by Pablo Escobar's hitmen on a platform in the municipality of Soacha, on the southern edge of the same capital that Carlos Fernando governs from now on. . He was 12 years old then. After the assassination, still under threat, Carlos Fernando went to live in Paris with his mother, Gloria Pachón, and his brothers Juan Manuel and Claudio.

His childhood was marked by political campaigns, one after the other, as Galán Sr. bonded with his children to keep them close, his cousin, the well-known librettist Juana Uribe, who is very close to the family, tells this newspaper. “Carlos Fernando was always calm, introverted, reflective,” she remembers. A Santa Fe fan, like a good Bogota native, the passion with which Carlos Fernando played soccer when he was studying at the Pedagogical, a public school, inspired her to write the famous television series From head to toe –and even to cast the protagonist of that story of a neighborhood team, Pablo Rey, played by Manuel José Chaves–. “Politics with a sense of service undoubtedly comes from his father, and having heard him say that a thousand times,” he says.

The years in France, where he finished high school at a public school and came of age, tested his ability to adapt and began to forge the conciliatory attitude that everyone recognizes in the new mayor. From there he went to the United States, where he studied Foreign Service at Georgetown University. When he finished his degree he dedicated himself to journalism, as his parents had done before. He was Washington correspondent for the magazine Weekreturned to Colombia to work in Change and ended up as political editor of the newspaper Time.

He made the leap into politics alongside Germán Vargas Lleras in the Cambio Radical party, with which he reached the Bogotá Council in 2007. From the council he opposed Mayor Samuel Moreno and denounced the “hiring carousel”, which ended up removing him from the Liévano Palace. At the end of that period, in 2011, he ran for Mayor for the first time; He finished fourth, with 12% of the votes. Later he was secretary of Transparency in the Government of Juan Manuel Santos and senator of Cambio Radical. As director of that party, he confronted the endorsements given to questioned politicians and withdrew them from more than a hundred candidates, but ended up leaving the community.

In his second attempt, four years ago, he ran for mayor through signatures. “You have a conciliatory spirit with which I completely agree,” journalist Marisol Gómez, who worked for 25 years in Time, by accepting Galán's proposal to head his list for the Council. “He attracted me with the idea of ​​a different politics, not falling into the vices of traditional politics, and doing everything thinking about the people,” recalls Gómez, who just finished his term and did not seek re-election. “Carlos Fernando found this step in journalism useful to be in contact with the real country, in the most comprehensive way,” he values.

Galán had already obtained more than a million votes in 2019, only to lose narrowly to Claudia López. If then he ran as an independent in a capital that prides itself on the weight of his opinion vote, in contrast to the political machines, on this occasion he did so with his own party, thanks to a ruling by the Constitutional Court. Carlos Fernando resigned his second term in the Council to promote the reborn New Liberalism, but the Senate list foundered along with the center coalition in the 2022 electoral cycle.

The most resounding of victories was forged in the heat of several defeats. He has learned to fall and get up from the hand of his wife, Carolina Deik from Barranquilla, with whom he has two children: Julieta, 10, and Juan Pablo, 4. Throughout this third attempt he looked serene and imperturbable, always dressed in the red jacket that he turned into a kind of campaign uniform, without getting into the mud. He chose to add membership to the 'Galán Express', the term they coined to announce support from political and opinion figures from different shores. From Cecilia María Vélez, Álvaro Uribe's Minister of Education, to Lucho Garzón, the first left-wing mayor of the capital, who wants to emulate his Bogotá without hunger policy. He now aims to repeat that difficult balance with the participation of various sectors in his first cabinet.

The political scientist and internationalist Sandra Borda, who entered politics on the failed Senate list of the New Liberalism that she shared with Galán and will now be high advisor for International Relations of the Mayor's Office, highlights that “Carlos Fernando has made the decision to walk the path much more difficult to do politics through concrete proposals and getting out of the game of polarization”, without personal attacks on his contenders. “He has the ability to rise above differences to listen very carefully to what everyone has to say.”

The now former mayor Claudia López has also been complimentary of her successor – and former adversary – by handing him the baton. “I am sure that this is the dream of her life and that she is going to shine with the purpose of building on what has been built,” she said recently in an interview with this newspaper. “He is a very conciliatory man, very calm. He genuinely tries to always highlight the best in others,” she described to him after the experience of having competed with him.

The relations between the mayor and President Gustavo Petro, with contrasting visions and characters, raise great expectations about the first steps of his administration. The president has also shown his determination to bury a section of the first line of the Bogotá metro, which Galán resists, now with a forceful mandate. The first meeting between the two after the elections took place at the beginning of December, within the framework of the Dubai climate summit. “We had a respectful conversation,” said the mayor-elect. They talked about the operating costs of the transportation system, higher education projects, the fight against hunger and early childhood care, Galán reported, in addition to the subway issue for which sparks were already raised in the campaign.

“It took us three elections, many tears and many learnings. He took us to deal with many attacks. It took us to overcome fears and trust ourselves again,” Galán himself recalled in his speech on election Sunday, October 29, when he obtained 49% of the votes, a larger victory than anticipated by the polls that he avoided. an unprecedented second round. “Those defeats shaped us, they made us know the city more and study more solutions so that everything runs as it should. We arrived. We won. Now we are obliged to make everyone win,” he promised that night. He also outlined three axes when he then asked to close the discussion around the metro to move it forward, work to tackle rampant insecurity and fight hunger in a capital that aims to regain confidence.

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