© KEYSTONE/EPA/Carlos Ortega
Left-wing opponent Gustavo Petro emerged as the big winner in Sunday’s elections in Colombia. He obtained historic results in the legislative elections once morest the right in power, while largely winning his camp’s presidential nomination on May 29.
At the end of a day of voting in calm and “transparency” according to the electoral authority, the left-wing coalition of the “historic pact” obtains 17 seats in the Senate out of 102, ahead of all the other traditional parties, according to official results. partials.
In the lower house, the left-wing coalition won 25 MP seats out of 165, in second position behind the Liberal Party (32), but neck and neck with the Conservatives and with the highest number of votes, according to these same results.
“At the gates” of power
The “Democratic Center”, the right-wing party of outgoing President Ivan Duque, who had obtained the largest number of votes in the Senate in the last legislative elections of 2018, suffered a heavy setback. He arrives this time in fifth position and in fourth place in the Chamber of Deputies.
“The historic pact has obtained the best results of progressivism in the history of the Republic of Colombia”, welcomed in the evening its leader Gustavo Petro. “We are on the verge of winning the presidency in the first round,” he assured, to the cheers of his supporters.
Nearly 39 million voters were called upon to renew for four years the 296 members of the Senate and the lower house, an outgoing Parliament controlled by a right in power out of breath, traditional stronghold of regional baronies with a considerably tarnished image by corruption cases.
presidential primaries
Colombians also had the opportunity to take part in the primaries of the main parties to choose the presidential candidates of May 29, in which the outgoing president, the conservative Ivan Duque, cannot stand once more. It was a question of designating, as one chooses, the candidate of one of the three coalitions of centre-right, centre-left or left.
These primaries, sometimes described as the first round before their time, in fact monopolized most of the debates in the campaign. As expected, Gustavo Petro, leading all the polls in recent months, won with around 80.5% of the vote at the head of his “historic pact”.
He preceded Francia Marquez, who however achieved a remarkable result (15%) and was, with her feminist, environmentalist and anti-racist speech, the revelation of these elections, in the opinion of many commentators.
Ex-guerrilla converted to social-democratic “progressivism”, Mr. Petro will face on May 29 the former mayor of Medellin Federico Gutierrez, who will represent the center-right coalition (“Team for Colombia”), and the ex-governor of the powerful department of Antoquia Sergio Fajardo for the center-left coalition “center hope”.
“Huge thirst for change”
Other candidates are already in the race, including Oscar Zuluaga for the “democratic center”, which does not take off in the voting intentions, the independent Rodolfo Hernandez and the former Franco-Colombian hostage Ingrid Betancourt. All three abstained from running in the primaries and are running under the colors of their own party.
“From tomorrow begins the first round of the presidential election,” warned Mr. Petro. He promised “to defend a program in favor of life” and “to change Colombia”. In a Latin American country historically ruled by the right, his accession to power would be a political earthquake.
For his part, Mr. Gutierrez, one of Mr. Petro’s fiercest opponents, called for “the protection of our democracy and the protection of our freedoms” once morest “populism”, while Mr. Fajardo resumed the slogan of the fight ” once morest corruption”, a theme brandished by almost all the candidates.
“It is obvious that there is an enormous thirst for change” today in Colombia, analyzed Jorge Restrepo, professor at the University of Javeriana. “If the left is winning”, the centrists have not managed to break the usual polarization of the country, and above all “the right is the big loser, the democratic center paying the consequences of the unpopularity of the outgoing government”, according to M Restrepo.
