Two men pose with the posters of both candidates in Bogotá.RAUL ARBOLEDA (AFP)
Gustavo Petro or Rodolfo Hernandez?
Only one of them will be elected president of Colombia next Sunday.
The two candidates who represent a change in the political cycle arrive separated by a narrow margin in the polls.
Whatever happens, the country will enter a new era.
Petro would mean a turn to the left after decades of being conservative.
Hernández, the coming to power of a construction businessman with a speech against the ruling political class, an electoral phenomenon that has been reproduced before in other countries.
One or the other will seize a nation divided, mired in discontent and in dire need of reform.
The last week is expected to be hectic.
The revelation of all the meetings of the Petro campaign team in the last eleven months has made it clear that there is a dirty war.
In the audios, the candidate's strategists talk about how to attack their rivals or soften Petro's image to widen his electorate.
The truth that naked electoral processes hide, which is not always edifying.
The obvious thing is that they were being spied on by some person or by some entity that has waited until the final stretch to influence the result.
The tension has skyrocketed and there is a feeling that what happens in the next seven days can tilt the victory to either side.
These are some key points that can define the choice.
The polls
The candidates arrive in a technical tie.
Both have demoscopic strengths and weaknesses.
Petro has a very loyal voter base, who will vote for him come what may.
But, until now, it has never been an absolute majority.
He wasn't four years ago and he isn't right now in the polls.
He needs to court part of the high white vote that is expected to ensure victory or demobilize the rival.
Although they are technically tied, Rodolfo Hernández appears in the lead in most polls.
His weakness is that his voters are more volatile and have gone down as he has become known.
Before he appeared little in the media, now people are beginning to have more references about him.
His exposure is not going to increase.
He has been in Miami for several days and has refused to debate face to face with Petro.
The strategies
Just by not being Petro you can already win an election in Colombia.
And Rodolfo Hernández is not.
A few days before the first round, the polls placed the former mayor of Bucaramanga as the winner.
His mere presence in the battle against the leader of the left added to his votes all the country's antipetrismo, which is not little.
The right, Uribismo, the establishment, the traditional parties and part of the political center gave their support to the unexpected candidate.
Few people knew Hernández then, but he was not Petro and that alone is enough for many.
There he defined his strategy: doing nothing could be the best way to win, not exposing himself, not going to debates and remaining unknown.
Hernández still hasn't disappeared, his presence on social networks is enormous, where his electoral success was born.
He launches his proposals on Twitter (even some different from those of his program), does live broadcasts on Facebook, in which he controls the message, and makes jokes on Tik Tok.
But the short electoral campaign between the first and second rounds (barely three weeks) is becoming long for him.
Hernández voters in the first round supported him as a change from traditional politics.
Voting now under the same wing as Uribe could scare many away.
Hernández has had serious complications navigating those waters.
He has distanced himself from Uribismo, even with progressive proposals, and has closed the door to the leader of the center, Sergio Fajardo.
Controversy has also accompanied him.
Beyond the fact that he made a flag with an anti-corruption speech despite being accused of a corruption case that drags from his mayor's office, his sexist comments or his ignorance in many matters have been able to stop his rise.
With the passing of days, he has been losing strength in the polls until last week in a technical tie with Petro.
The leader of the left was forced to do just the opposite.
After more than a year leading the polls and with his comfortable victory on May 29, the
sorpasso
de Hernández put the entire Petrismo on alert.
Petro decided to change the rallies and the platform, in which he has the title of expert, by seeking votes directly in those places where Rodolfo beat him in the first round.
He also joined the wave of social networks, with live broadcasts from anywhere in the country, while fishing in the Magdalena or sleeping with a family in Suaita, Santander, Hernández's department.
Petro attended debates with feminists and multiplied his presence in the media.
Meanwhile, his vice-presidential candidate, Francia Márquez, moved to Cali to continue enlarging the manna of Petrista votes on the Pacific coast, where the Afro vote is concentrated and where they aspire to widen their advantage.
As days go by,
the left managed to cut the advantage that Hernández had taken from him and even placed himself ahead in some polls.
This was the case until last Thursday, when several media outlets revealed a leak with hundreds of hours of private meetings of his campaign.
The dirty war
The videos will continue to come out.
Beyond what they say, the important thing is the feeling they convey.
Trump based part of his victory in the United States on an alleged scandal over the use of a private email made by Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State under Obama.
The investigation that the FBI opened during the campaign generated a climate of suspicion about Clinton.
Over time, that came to nothing.
What has been published so far does not show any crime.
Petro himself has said that if any recording appears in which he commits or asks to commit something illegal he will resign instantly.
The focus is not on who she has spied on and why she did it.
That can play against Petro in such a closed stage.
Petrismo is very aggressive and haughty in social networks, but at the same time Petro is the candidate who circulates the most false information,
especially in WhatsApp groups.
There are chains in which he is accused of practicing satanic rites or of having been a confidant of drug trafficker Pablo Escobar.
Directors of large media outlets have spread false tweets that the candidate has not written and have kept them online despite being warned that they are
fake news
.
On the other side, Rodolfo Hernández awaits some kind of revelation about his past.
So far there have been videos of him threatening to shoot an architect, bragging about overcharging land for poor people, or beating up an opposition politician.
At any moment he can jump on something new that captures the attention of the electorate.
The results
The moment of truth will be known on Sunday afternoon after the most tense campaign in Colombia's history.
Everything seems to indicate that the presidency will be decided in a few votes, which could open several uncertain scenarios if one of the two candidates does not accept the result due to the closeness of the count and demands a recount or encourages the possibility of fraud.
Neither of the two things are alien to Colombian politics.
In the legislative elections last March, the national registrar, supported by President Iván Duque, maintained for 24 hours the possibility of a recount of all the votes, clearly illegal, due to a gap between the quick count and the scrutiny official.
And the word "electoral fraud" is used with great ease from all sides of the political table.
Petro and Rodolfo will speak on Sunday night.
One as president and one as defeated.
The words chosen by the second could mark the destiny of the first.
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