Gustavo Petro, presidential candidate for the Historical Pact. LUISA GONZALEZ (REUTERS)
In a political campaign, each action provokes a reaction, especially if it is tight, as indicated by the technical tie between Rodolfo Hernández and Gustavo Petro that appeared in the photo of the latest published polls.
When a candidate raises the dialectical temperature seeking to mobilize his own, he will also cause the attention of others to turn towards him.
Any attack is an opportunity to reinforce the defense, and the counterattack.
And any sign of growth on one side serves as an incentive for the other to also rise from undecided to less so.
This paradox affects Colombia, with special intensity to Petro.
The leftist managed in the first round to surpass by 500,000 votes what he already got in the second round of 2018. The feat of eight and a half million is unusual for someone who comes from that specific end of the spectrum, one who has never been even close to the Colombian executive power.
Petro and his campaign have put the engine of the mobilization at maximum power.
Thanks to that, it is very likely that it will exceed nine million in the second round of 2022, and some analysts are already speculating about passing the ten million barrier.
But it is precisely this feeling that Petro has a good chance of reaching the presidency that is his worst enemy.
Many who doubted whether it was worth supporting a candidate as heterodox (to say the least) as Hernández, without a defined plan or ideology,
Faced with this situation, Petro has had to develop a campaign in the second round of an intermediate tone, with less volume than the one that tried (unsuccessfully) in the first round to put it above the 50% that it would have needed to save the second round.
Probably, both he and his strategists anticipated that "anyone but Petro" would work much better with only two candidates, and that in this scenario the paradox of mobilization against would gain strength every time they try to encourage those who are in favor. .
Indeed, the Colombian electoral map of the first round indicates that this risk is not negligible.
We can approximate the municipalities with more room for mobilization with a simple formula that mixes abstentionists with voters for other candidates than those who made it to the second round, and also ensuring that participation in that place has been below the observed in 2018. The combination of all of them gives us a kind of approximate thermometer that divides the Colombian municipalities according to what one can expect participation to increase in the second round.
The focus remains on Antioquia, a traditionally conservative land, and therefore of little interest to Petro.
But yes for Rodolfo Hernández, who in fact needs support from the (post)uribista right to win.
There is another more interesting nucleus for Petro to the north, before touching the Caribbean Sea.
Here it would undoubtedly have greater potential, but not as clear as it would be if the cities and the Pacific were the places with more room to add mobilization.
And, indeed, when one transfers these data to a correlation with the vote of the defeated candidate (with 5 million votes in spite of everything) from which Petro could get the least, 'Fico' Gutiérrez, it turns out that the higher the percentage conservative in the first round, the more potential there is for mobilization.
The margin of starting new votes is therefore in Rodolfo, not in Petro.
That is why the dilemma is for the second and not so much for the first, which could have allowed a greater confrontation because the returns that it had to obtain from the paradox of double mobilization were, on paper, greater.
For Petro, the campaign appeared like a field of dialectical mines that he had to overcome to avoid that, by blowing up one, the rest would explode, putting Rodolfo at his maximum potential: the 11 million votes that he would add if of his 6 in the first round not lose any, and of the 5 of 'Fico' he will keep all.
Thus, the key data of these elections will be participation.
And this time it can be assumed that the higher it is, the worse for the left.
This is why the election on Sunday, June 19, will be won or lost by Rodolfo Hernández, more than Gustavo Petro.
It remains to be seen at what specific level of the count his electoral engine will stop, but regardless of sympathy or antipathy, what seems clear is that he has maximized the possibilities from which he started, understanding that an even greater acceleration would have provoked an electorally unacceptable reaction in the rival side by virtue of polarization.
We'll find out Sunday night if he kept his balance or, finally, poured too much gas into his campaign.