After a victory that tasted of defeat, the Shameful Petristas soon came out to classify the Engineer as Uribe’s covered rooster, attributing his victory to a Machiavellian strategy of his enemy. They are nervous because their closed candidate went from selling himself as the hope of change, to becoming the most faithful representative of a traditional political class that the electorate wants to eradicate. Faced with this new scenario, they have begun to unfold a new narrative, demonizing the Engineer, turning him into the living reincarnation of Uribe, and accusing him of being corrupt, misogynist and a follower of Hitler. The challenge of the ‘little old man’ is to continue with the same strategy that gave him victory last Sunday: not letting his tongue be stung and not falling into a rhetoric of left-wing populism, which ends up subtracting from his political arithmetic, which today has him as sure winner.
Although Petro and his henchmen until Sunday seemed “Untouchables” – like the Italian mafia that dominated the streets of Chicago in times of prohibition – their moral impudence and lack of adherence to the law began to take their toll. They believed they might make alliances with political clans; get drunk on the platforms; receive money bags; make agreements with the La Picota Cartel; announce a policy of pacification with drug traffickers; and send Teodora to fetch dollars in cash from Venezuela a few days before the presidential elections; and nothing was going to happen to them. But we Colombians are not stupid and we understand that the ‘Change’ that they represent does not exist: neither in politics, nor in the journalism that secretly defends them.
Today the challenge for the Engineer is to continue being the ‘outsider’ of politics and who best represents fighting corruption. And although his ‘Trumpesque’ speech of putting an end to the excesses of perks to politicians -the Creole equivalent of ‘draining the swamp’- is quite appealing, he must be careful not to fall into an irrational populism that weakens him with those sectors of the right that can give him the 4 or 5 million votes he needs to defeat Petro.
But as it is popularly said, politics is regarding sensations. And although today many on the right have the pleasant feeling of having a candidate who can defeat the lord of the bags, let’s not underestimate the shameful Petristas – who for ideological reasons and their hatred of Uribe – are going to join Roy and Benedetti in this cross. They are aware that they have never been so close to Bolívar’s throne, and they are going to mobilize all his strategies and rain down money to guarantee a victory.
And as much as I like that the Engineer has managed to snatch the speech from the left on social, environmental and anti-corruption issues, he has to be careful because we do not want a race between left-wing populists that leads to an important sector of the electorate from the right to join the percentage of abstentionism that has historically permeated our elections. Hopefully his progressive agenda, his indecipherable style and his changing opinion to the sway of social networks, do not end up demotivating those of us who today are enthusiastic regarding “the old man.”
We do not want to serve Petro the Presidency on a silver platter, because that would be a true irony.
