It is quite difficult for Petro to win in the first round. But in the second round he has a high probability of doing it because of the advantage he will have in this instance. In any case, the one who can complicate life a bit is Rodolfo Hernández at the end of the contest
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Colombian left-wing presidential candidate Gustavo Petro of the Historical Pact coalition reacts during his arrival for a televised debate on the Caracol channel, in Bogotá, Colombia, on May 27, 2022. REUTERS/Luisa González
I met Gustavo Petro in March 1994. In those days he had been defeated in his aspiration to the Congress of the Republic. He went to visit us in Flor del Monte, a corregimiento in the department of Sucre, where the Corriente de Renovación Socialista, a faction of the ELN, was signing a peace agreement with the government of Cesar Gaviria Trujillo. If I remember correctly, he stayed in the camp for more than a week sharing with the guerrillas and ruminating on the anguish of his failure.
He looked pretty angry. He attributed his loss and the decline of the M-19 in that electoral campaign to the serious errors of Antonio Navarro and the movement’s leadership. They had delivered some revolutionary flags in the Constituent Assembly; also in the participation in the cabinet of Gaviria; and there were the consequences, he said. They had allowed themselves to be co-opted by the neoliberal government, he claimed.
Then I followed his path step by step. At first because we frequently met in the political activities of the left and later because, in my work as an analyst and writer, I have spent a good deal of time studying his speeches and debates as a parliamentarian or his achievements in the government of Bogotá.
I was surprised over and over again by his persistence and his unappealable vocation for change and revolution. Always faithful to what he had said in Flor del Monte, the need to challenge the establishment, to radically transform the Colombian economy and society. Always in the messianic illusion of saving the country from paramilitarism and mafias, from the centuries-old political class, from dependence on extractive industries and from poverty and inequality.
With those convictions and those ideas, he is about to win the presidency of the Republic. I never thought it would go this far. Colombian society went through the twentieth century and settled in the twenty-first without showing signs of wanting profound changes. Conservative and cunning elites have always found ways to avert risks and remain in power. At the beginning of the century, society and the elites embraced Álvaro Uribe Vélez who offered them security in the face of the advance of the guerrillas on the one hand and the rise of a left wing away from violence on the other. Petro for his part, in his lone wolf condition, went from one alliance to another, from one campaign to another, without finding a solid anchor for his project.
But some powerful events came that catapulted his leadership and softened his flaws, which are not few. The peace agreement was signed with the most powerful guerrilla and under this process the national political elites were divided; the opinion vote began to grow in the big cities and the left won key mayoralties; The pandemic arrived with its trail of death, uncertainty and hunger; the social explosion took place that brought seven million people from six hundred municipalities of the country to the streets; another wave of leftist governments reached the shores of Latin America; and uribismo plummeted under the weight of the judicial mess, the seriousness of the 6,402 extrajudicial executions of unarmed people and the outrages of the lousy government of Iván Duque.
Gustavo Petro has led the polls with an advantage since the beginning of the campaign. Hence, the inter-party consultations and the first round have become competitions to choose a rival who has a chance of defeating Petro. Until a few days ago, Federico Gutiérrez, supported by the Liberal, Conservative, Democratic Center, Radical Change, U, Mira and 45 political clans, appeared as someone who would go to the second round to compete with the candidate from the left. But for two months he had been stuck at twenty points or a little more; instead, Rodolfo Hernández, the outsiderof the contest, he left Sergio Fajardo behind and began to grow, to the point that today, some analysts are betting that this May 29 he can win the ticket for the second round by displacing Gutiérrez.
It is quite difficult for Petro to win in the first round. But in the second round he has a high probability of doing it because of the advantage he will have in this instance. In any case, the one who can complicate life a bit is Rodolfo Hernández, at the end of the contest.
*León Valencia Agudelo is a political analyst who is an expert on issues related to the armed conflict in Colombia. Director of the Peace & Reconciliation. Opinion columnist in the magazines Semana, Diners and Credencial, and in the newspapers El Tiempo and El Colombiano. He is the writer of political texts such as: ‘Goodbye to politics, welcome to war’ (2002) and ‘Miseries of war, hope of peace’. He recently presented the second edition of the book ‘My years of war’, which recounts his experiences as an ELN militant.