Enlarge image
Presidential candidate Petro (at the closing rally of his campaign on May 22 in Colombia): Historic opportunity
Photo:
Fernando Vergara / dpa
The man with the best chance of becoming Colombia's next president will be guarded as if he were already the head of state.
During the closing ceremony of his campaign last Sunday, Gustavo Petro, 62, wore a bulletproof vest, stood behind an armored desk and was flanked by two bodyguards with riot shields.
The left-wing politician had canceled appearances several times because he had received death threats. For security reasons, his agenda was kept secret until the last moment.
On Sunday, he waved a flag in the national colors to a cheering crowd in the Plaza de Armas in central Bogotá.
"The hour has come!" he cried.
"All the guns together can't change history the way a pen writes, we're going to prove that.
Next Sunday we will change the history of Colombia".
Indeed, Colombia faces a turning point if Petro is elected the South American country's head of state that day -- or in the likely necessary runoff three weeks later -- as all polls predict.
For the first time in the more than 200-year-old history of the South American country, the left could come to power.
A reformed, moderate left, as Petro never tires of emphasizing.
But for the ruling elite, it is still as if Beelzebub was preparing to move into the presidential palace in Bogotá himself.
As a youngster, Petro was part of a guerrilla movement, and he nominated Francia Márquez, a black civil rights activist and champion of women's rights and environmental protection, as running mate.
In conservative Colombia, their victory would be tantamount to a revolution.
Right and left warn against electoral fraud
"We haven't had such complicated elections since the 1970s," says lawyer and sociologist Rodrigo Uprimny, who knows the political scene.
“The country has never been so polarized.
There is a real danger that the ruling class will not recognize the result and the country will plunge into institutional chaos.« Right and left alike warn against electoral fraud;
The army chief recently tweeted against a Petro victory – never before has the military interfered so openly in politics.
Despite the drug war and guerrilla wars, Colombia has always been a stronghold of political stability in the region.
Four presidential candidates have been assassinated since the 1980s;
Left-wing rebels and right-wing paramilitaries control vast interior regions and have committed heinous atrocities.
But they never managed to capture the big cities and thus the centers of power in the country.
Elections were held every four years, with Liberals and Conservatives alternating in power, so it was a tacit agreement.
When the pact fell, the right-wing benefited: from 2002 to 2010, the right-wing populist Alvaro Uribe ruled Colombia with an iron fist.
He pushed back the guerrillas, while at the same time maintaining excellent contacts with right-wing paramilitaries.
The man from Medellín was so popular that he also had a decisive influence on the election of the next two heads of state.
Uribe's longtime defense minister Juan Manuel Santos, who was elected president in 2010 and ruled until 2018, fell out with his mentor when he came to power: in 2016 he signed a peace agreement with the guerrilla FARC, which Uribe rejected.
But after the end of his reign four years ago, Uribe supporters took over the leadership of the state again.
Iván Duque, a conservative former World Bank executive, was elected president.
The Uribe man turned out to be the wrong choice: never before has a president been so unpopular at the end of his term.
The promised political awakening did not materialize, and under Duque only the small upper class, from which he came, flourished.
The social crisis worsened;
In no other Latin American country, with the exception of Brazil, is the abyss between rich and poor as great as in Colombia.
Corona escalated the crisis
The land reform promised in the peace agreement largely failed to materialize, and the reintegration of the disarmed ex-FARC guerrillas is faltering.
At the same time, violence has exploded in rural areas, where renegade rebels and former paramilitaries have joined forces with drug dealers to form armed gangs.
Corona escalated the crisis, hundreds of thousands lost their jobs.
Between 2019 and 2021, mass demonstrations erupted in the country's main cities, and the police responded with exceptionally brutal force.
Meanwhile, Duque and his mentor Uribe filled key posts like the Attorney General's office with their supporters.
"Large parts of public administration are now in the hands of the right," says Uprimny.
Because the promised reforms have been repeatedly postponed, the desire for change is now overwhelming.
The democratic left, which has renounced the armed struggle, benefits from this.
"The protest movement has strengthened the left," says Uprimny.
"At the same time, Uribe's influence has been weakened." Allegations of corruption and his close ties to the paramilitary have damaged Uribe's reputation, and he has to answer in court.
It also helps the left that the guerrillas no longer pose a great threat.
In addition, despite his guerrilla past, 62-year-old Petro is not a radical.
He studied economics at a private university;
in the 1980s he belonged to the guerrilla M-19, an urban rebel movement that caused a sensation with spectacular actions such as the storming of the Palace of Justice in Bogotá in 1985.
In 1990 it laid down its arms and turned into a political party.
Petro was a member of parliament and a senator in Congress, and from 2012 to 2015 he was mayor of the capital Bogotá.
He is running for the presidency for the second time.
»Petro is a caudillo«
He gained respect for his fearless fight against the right-wing paramilitaries, which had infiltrated parts of the state and the security apparatus under Uribe.
Petro is not particularly charismatic, but he is an accomplished debater and well-read.
He is aiming for a change in the economic model, wants to tax the rich more heavily and has declared war on climate change: Colombia obtains a large part of its foreign exchange from the export of oil and coal, and he wants to reduce this dependency.
"He wants a kind of green social democracy," says Uprimny.
Nevertheless, he is critical of Petro's candidacy: "Petro tends towards authoritarianism, he's a caudillo." The candidate recently announced that as president he wants to declare an economic emergency - he would then not need to submit important legislative projects to Congress and could govern by decree.
"Petro doesn't feel very committed to the rule of law," says Uprimny.
"He could easily turn his supporters against the institutions." This temptation is all the greater because Petro's party alliance Pacto Histórico does not have a majority in Congress.
Right-wing entrepreneurs and politicians are warning of a dictatorship like that in neighboring Venezuela, and some of the rich are taking their money out of the country.
Her candidate so far has been Federico "Fico" Gutiérrez, a former mayor of Medellín.
But in polls he's stagnating at just over 20 percent, in a runoff he probably wouldn't have a chance against Petro.
More and more Petro opponents are apparently defecting to the candidate Rodolfo Hernández, a populist outsider who is fighting corruption as a monotheme in his election campaign.
The 77-year-old former contractor was elected mayor of the city of Bucaramanga in 2016.
Two years later, he was temporarily suspended from office for punching a city councilman in the face.
His reputation as a political brawler doesn't bother him: "I cleaned up the fauna of corrupt politicians who had plundered the city," he twanged to SPIEGEL over lunch in Bogotá.
"Four weeks before the election, I was in the polls at four percent, I won at 32." Now he wants to repeat the political feat at national level.
“You can't rely on the polls;
Hernández has no party behind him;
he finances his election campaign out of his own pocket, he says.
He has a particularly strong presence on social media, where he campaigns for votes as “the old man from TikTok”.
"For me there is no left or right," he says.
"The vast majority of politicians are criminals who have put on a cloak and betray the interests of the people."
Disenchantment with politics is great
Such sayings are well received by many Colombians, who are disenchanted with politics.
According to polls, Hernández will be neck and neck for second place with right-hand Gutiérrez.
According to pollsters, in a run-off election he could be the only one who could pose a threat to left-wing Petro: he doesn't fit into any political scheme, and attacks on the right don't catch on with him.
Hernández's surprising political rise has earned him the support of one of the most controversial figures in Colombian politics: former Green Party politician Ingrid Betancourt, who was kidnapped by the guerrilla FARC during her first presidential candidacy in 2002 and was held hostage for six years, has given up her own candidacy and decided to retire pronounced in a joint appearance for the election of Hernández.
He is the only promising candidate from the political center, she assures.
The Franco-Colombian, who enjoys a better reputation abroad than at home, is unlikely to bring the old man many votes: according to polls, she did not get more than one percent in her own candidacy.