BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Two anti-establishment candidates, left-wing leader Gustavo Petro and right-wing populist Rodolfo Hernández, took the top spots in Colombia’s presidential election, dealing a heavy blow to the country’s conservative ruling political class.
The two men will face each other in a second round of elections on June 19, which is shaping up to be one of the most important in the country’s history. At stake is the country’s economic model, its democratic integrity, and the livelihoods of millions of people who were plunged into poverty during the pandemic.
With more than 99 percent of the ballots counted on Sunday night, Petro was supported by more than 40 percent of the vote, while Hernandez received just over 28 percent. Hernández led the conservative establishment candidate, Federico Gutiérrez, who was running second in the polls, by more than four percentage points.
Hernandez’s unexpected second-place win shows a nation willing to elect anyone who doesn’t represent the country’s dominant conservative leaders.
According to Colombian political scientist Daniel García-Peña, the confrontation between Petro and Hernández represents “change against change.”
For months, the polls had shown Petro, who proposes a modification to the country’s capitalist economic model, ahead of the conservative former mayor of Medellín Federico Gutiérrez.
It was only recently that Hernandez, running on a populist and anti-corruption platform, began to rise in the polls.
If Petro ultimately wins in the next round of voting, it would be a historic moment for one of the most politically conservative societies in Latin America, setting Colombia on a new and unknown path.
In his speech after the elections, in a hotel near the center of Bogotá, Petro was accompanied by his vice-presidential candidate and said that Sunday’s results showed that the political project of the current president and his allies “has been defeated.”
He then quickly issued warnings about Hernandez, calling voting for him a dangerous regression and challenging voters to take a chance on what he called a progressive project, “true change.”
His rise reflects not just a shift to the left across Latin America, but a push against incumbent governments that has gathered force as the pandemic has deepened poverty and inequality, intensifying the sense that the region’s economies they are built primarily to serve the elites.
That resentment against the political establishment seems to have given Hernández a boost in the second round and indicates the waning power of Uribismo, a hardline conservatism that has dominated Colombian politics for the past two decades and is named for its founder, former president Álvaro Uribe.
At polling stations across the country on Sunday, Petro supporters cited that frustration and a renewed sense of hope.
“It is a historic moment that Colombia is experiencing. We don’t want more continuity, we don’t want more Uribism,” said Chiro Castellanos, 37, a Petro supporter in Sincelejo, a city near the Caribbean coast. “I feel that this is a change, it is a country project that is not just Gustavo Petro.”
But in many places there were also fears of what such a change might mean, as well as calls for a more moderate approach.
“This country really has come to nothing,” said Myriam Matallana, 55, a Gutiérrez supporter in Bogotá, the capital. But with Petro, she said, “it would be worse.”
Petro has promised to transform Colombia’s economic system, which he says fuels inequality, by expanding social programs, halting oil exploration and shifting the country’s focus to domestic industry and agriculture.
For a long time, Colombia has been the strongest ally of the United States in the region and a victory for Petro could mean a confrontation with Washington. The candidate called for a readjustment of the relationship, including changes in the approach to the war on drugs and a reevaluation of a bilateral trade agreement.
The elections come at a time when polls show growing distrust in the country’s institutions, including Congress, political parties, the military, the press and the National Registry, an electoral body.
It also happens at a time when violence is on the rise; Earlier this month, a criminal group issued an immobility order that paralyzed a considerable part of the country for at least four days.
Prior to the elections, there was widespread concern that these factors could affect the democratic process.
“If we stay at home saying ‘everyone is corrupt,’ we’re not going to achieve anything,” said María Gañan, 27, who voted for Hernández in Bogotá. “We want to change the history of the country.”
Hernández, who was relatively unknown until a few weeks ago, presented himself to voters as an anti-corruption candidate, and proposed rewarding citizens for denouncing acts of corruption and appointing Colombians who already reside abroad to diplomatic positions, which he says will save on travel and other costs, as well as ban unnecessary celebrations at embassies.
“Today the country lost to politicking and corruption,” Hernández said in a note he posted on Facebook for his followers, after Sunday’s results.
“Today they lost the sheaves that believed they would be the government forever,” he added.
But some of Hernández’s proposals have been criticized as undemocratic.
Specifically, it has proposed declaring a state of emergency for 90 days and suspending all judicial and administrative functions to combat corruption, generating fears that he can shut down congress or suspend mayors.
Many voters are fed up with rising prices, high unemployment, rising education costs, violence, and polls show that a clear majority of Colombians have an unfavorable opinion of the current conservative government.
Other candidates who promoted changes have been assassinated during electoral campaigns in Colombia. Petro and his running mate, Francia Márquez, have received death threats, prompting their security to be beefed up with bodyguards and bulletproof shields.
However, the election was also characterized by a broadening of the political spectrum.
In a matter of months, Márquez, an environmental activist who, if successful, would become the country’s first black vice president, became a national phenomenon, bringing a gender, race and class-conscious approach to the election that few candidates have. succeeded in invoking in the history of the country.
His popularity has been seen as a reflection of the deep desire of many voters – black, indigenous, poor, peasants – to see themselves represented in the highest positions of power.
On Sunday, Márquez could have voted in the country’s capital. But he decided to travel to the southwestern department of Cauca, where he grew up.
“Today they are dividing the history of this country in two,” he said shortly after casting his vote. “Today one of the nobodies and nobodies, of the historically excluded, stands up to occupy politics.”
Sofia Villamil, Megan Janetsky y Genevieve Glatsky reported from Bogotá, and Federico Rios from Suárez, Cauca.
Julie Turkewitz is chief of the Andes bureau, which covers Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Suriname and Guyana. Before moving to South America, she was a national affairs correspondent and covered the western United States. @julieturkewitz