Gustavo Petro says he will reduce inequality and is the first chance for the left to govern the country. Rodolfo Hernández, very active on social media, is focused on the anti-corruption discourse. Second round is this Sunday. Colombia, the second most populous country in South America, will choose this Sunday (19/06) who will be its next president. The options are the progressive Gustavo Petro, who has been a deputy, senator and mayor of Bogotá and is running for office for the third time promising to reduce inequalities and strengthen social policies, and the ultra-rightist Rodolfo Hernández, a construction entrepreneur and former mayor of Bucaramanga who is very active on social media and has anti-corruption discourse as a campaign axis.
In the first round, held on May 29, Petro received 40% of the votes and Hernández, 28%. Now, both appear technically tied in several election polls.
Current Colombian President Iván Duque, who has ruled the country since 2018, has low approval ratings and did not make a name for himself in the second round. He represents the traditional right-wing current led by former president Álvaro Uribe, who ruled the country from 2002 to 2010. The two candidates facing each other this Sunday have speeches of change in relation to the current administration.
It is the first time that the Colombian left, which has historically been associated with guerrilla violence and has had several social leaders assassinated, has a chance of winning a presidential race in Colombia. Petro, 62, was jailed for 18 months in the 1980s for his activity as a member of the M-19 guerrilla group and today presents himself as a moderate progressive who wants to expand access to social rights and protect the environment.
Hernández, 77, has built a strong presence on social media and messaging apps such as TikTok and WhatsApp to present himself as a candidate from outside the political system and against corruption – however, he himself is investigated in a process that determines the direction of bidding when he was mayor, which he denies. Among his proposals is selling planes and cars used by authorities and turning the presidential residence into a museum.
This year’s campaign is also unique in the fact that the peace process is not the central point of the debates. In 2016, Colombia signed the peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Violence, however, continues, especially in rural areas.
In addition, the two names in the second round have black women as candidates for vice. Petro’s running mate is Francia Márquez, 40, an environmental and human rights activist who rose to prominence in fighting illegal gold mining. Hernández’s running mate is Marelen Castillo, 53, who has an academic career in the sciences and was dean of two Catholic universities.
Series of protests wore down uribismo and strengthened the left
The Duque government was marked by a series of protests violently repressed by security forces. In late 2019, his proposals to make the labor market and the pension system more flexible, among others, resulted in street demonstrations that began peacefully and evolved into curfews and heavy repression – one student, Dilan Cruz, 18, was killed after being wounded in the head by a tear gas grenade.
Another sequence of protests erupted in September 2020, now against police and Armed Forces violence, whose trigger was the death of Javier Ordóñez after a police approach in Bogotá. The demonstrations, compared to the reaction to the death of Georg Floyd in the United States in March of that year, suffered strong repression by state forces, and 13 people were killed.
In May 2021, a government proposal for a tax reform that increased the value-added tax on some products, food and services and increased the number of people who would pay income tax, burdening the middle class, sparked a new wave of demonstrations, which again lasted several days and was brutally suppressed. In the end, 18 civilians and one policeman died, and the government withdrew its tax reform proposal.
The broth of these demonstrations included dissatisfaction with the increase in poverty and social inequality, exacerbated by the covid-19 pandemic, and the abuse of human rights throughout the country. The organization of the protests strengthened the interaction between leftist groups, which ended up favoring the construction of Petro’s candidacy around a coalition called the Historic Pact.
Petro’s campaign axis is to reduce income inequality, strengthen social policies and implement an environmental defense agenda, with proposals such as increasing taxes levied on the richest, reducing the exploitation of natural resources and reforming the police and the Army.
The erosion of the current Colombian government, on the other hand, imposed a severe defeat on Uribismo, which had won presidential elections in the country since 2002: first with Álvaro Uribe, then with Juan Manuel Santos – with whom he later broke up – and finally with Duque. The collapse of this political group opened space on the right for the emergence of Hernández.
Hernández capitalizes anti-left vote
The businessman, who has been dubbed “Trump Tropical” by the local press, rose in the polls in the days leading up to the first round and overtook conservative Federico “Fico” Gutiérrez, the former mayor of Medellín.
Still in the first round, he got the support of former FARC guerrilla hostage Íngrid Betancourt, the only woman running in the election, who decided to withdraw from the race due to her poor results in the polls. In the second round, he benefits from being the only anti-left name in the running.
Candidate of the Anti-Corruption League of Governors movement, created by himself, Hernández made the title of “engineer” something inseparable from his name, giving the idea that, being rich, he would not need to steal from the public coffers.
In 2016, he stated in an interview that he admired Adolf Hitler, who he called a “great German thinker”. After the negative repercussion, he said that he had been wrong and that he was actually referring to Albert Einstein. Two years later, he slapped an opposition councilor from Bucamaranga, Jhon Claro, in the face during a meeting that was being videotaped.
Self-proclaimed “King of TikTok”, Hernández has more than 600,000 followers on the social network, is also strong on other platforms, has organized a network of WhatsApp groups with his supporters and often broadcasts videos with heated comments. For this reason, some analysts sometimes compare him to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro as well as Trump. He has already said, for example, that the ideal for women was to dedicate themselves to raising children and has already called Venezuelan women “factories for poor children”.
Hernández has tried to reduce the negative impact of these past statements by promising, in this campaign, to promote gender equality in the workplace and to close the pay gap between men and women. Her proposals also include reducing bureaucracy for starting a business and encouraging digital entrepreneurship.
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