Sergio Fajardo at a voting center in Medellín, Colombia.JOAQUIN SARMIENTO (AFP)
His fourth place among the main candidates for the Presidency, far from sneaking into an elusive second round that had narrowly escaped him four years ago, marks the twilight of Sergio Fajardo's unusual political career.
The dream of a
professor president,
as the famous chant says, did not materialize.
The mathematician who left the academy for public service more than 20 years ago did not achieve the improbable “comeback” promised by the Hope Center Coalition.
In the end, he has been in a very poor fourth place.
Although for now it is not clear that he will be inclined to support any of the options in the second round on June 19, his wink is still desired.
The failure of Fajardo's third presidential aspiration has several explanations.
The first round ended as a race between former mayors.
Gustavo Petro governed in Bogotá (2012-2015) and Rodolfo Hernández in Bucaramanga (2016-2019), while Medellín was under the command at different times of both Fajardo (2004-2007) and Fico Gutiérrez (2016-2019).
The capital of the department of Antioquia has been a source of inspiration for other Colombian cities so far this century as the scene of a praised urban renewal that served as an antidote to the violence of large drug cartels.
Fajardo, son of a renowned architect, is recognized as the architect of this transformation of Medellín.
He left office with a favorability of 85% and was chosen as the best mayor in Colombia, with a management much better valued than that of Fico Gutiérrez.
However, he failed to display that resume.
The Mayor's memory of him seems increasingly distant, while Gutiérrez was able to maintain his popularity with a management that is fresher in his memory, even if it did not have so much luster.
Fajardo was also governor of Antioquia between 2012 and 2015, but that position does not carry much weight among the inhabitants of Medellín.
The countless misunderstandings of the Hope Center Coalition throughout the campaign also took their toll.
Opinion studies consistently indicate that a large majority of Colombians consider themselves to be centrists, but the alliance did not translate that potential into voters.
In the presidential elections four years ago, the division of the vote between the candidacies of Humberto de la Calle and Sergio Fajardo prevented the mathematician from reaching the second round.
The center seemed to have learned its lesson, but friendly fire abounded.
The noisy departure of Ingrid Betancourt to embark on an erratic individual adventure – which also ended in a last-minute accession to Rodolfo Hernández – ended up staining the cohesion of the bloc.
Always on the edge, the center tried to remain a competitive option but could not consolidate.
In the March consultation, from which Fajardo was chosen, it was by far the least voted among the three large coalitions.
Gutiérrez tripled Fajardo's 723,000 votes, and Petro quintupled them.
Even Francia Márquez, despite finishing second in the Historical Pact, surpassed her individual vote.
Fajardo started with a low floor.
Since then, neither the choice of Luis Gilberto Murillo as his vice-presidential formula;
nor the arrival of the American strategist Teddy Goff, who has advised Barack Obama;
nor the presence in the last days of his partner, the remembered former Foreign Minister María Ángela Holguín, were enough to achieve the turnaround that she needed in a campaign that was inclined towards polarization.
The attempts to give a change of direction by joining with Rodolfo Hernández, the unclassifiable independent candidate who managed to rebound in recent days, did not prosper either.
With diametrically opposed forms, personalities and careers, Fajardo and Hernández are united by an identity around the fight against corruption, the professor pointed out at the time when justifying that move that did not come to anything, but it did drive the engineer.
The desire of the
professor president
is an inheritance that has lost its appeal at the polls.
It goes back to the times of his first presidential aspiration, in which he finished as second on board the
green wave
, which in 2010 took Antanas Mockus to the second round.
They then lost to Juan Manuel Santos.
In the middle of that campaign, Fajardo fell off his bicycle and broke his left hip, but he recovered from his physical and electoral injuries with the victory that made him governor of Antioquia.
Already in 2018 he returned to seek the Presidency.
He obtained more than 4.5 million votes in the first round and was only 250,000 behind Petro, who disputed the ballot with President Iván Duque.
He had then decided to withdraw from electoral politics, but a talk with the late economist Guillermo Perry, a close adviser, convinced him to persist.
In the meantime, he fulfilled his dream of going to see whales in the Pacific at the decisive moment, but having released that phrase –and having chosen to vote blank– has made him the focus of Petrismo's attacks.
He too lost valuable time, while Petro has been campaigning ever since.
Along the way, Fajardo had to face two trials for his actions when he was governor, which revived the shadow of a politically motivated persecution against him.
At some point he had to divide his time between what he called "two campaigns," one presidential and one to defend himself.
He dealt with a process from the Prosecutor's Office for not having anticipated the volatility of the dollar when acquiring a loan and another before the Comptroller's Office for Hidroituango, a project that has suffered landslides, delays and losses.
The second was already closed in his favor earlier this year.
Fajardo has insisted that he feels like a victim of politicized control bodies, in the hands of people very close to President Duque.
Until this Sunday, one of his main advisers was another renowned economist, José Antonio Ocampo, whom Petro said this week that he would like to have as finance minister.
Ocampo responded to this public flirtation by inviting people to vote for Fajardo, but he is not the only moderate figure that Petrismo has courted.
The ex-rector of the Andes Alejandro Gaviria, Fajardo's program chief after the shipwreck of his own aspiration, tensed the coalition a few days ago by winking at Petro's candidacy in statements to the
Financial Times
.
With Fajardo out of the running, the fate of the center's other prominent cards may tip the balance in the second round.
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