Gustavo Petro's moment

Gustavo Petro together with Antanas Mockus and Francia Márquez.

Behind, the mother of Dilan Cruz, a young man killed by the Police during protests against the government of Iván Duque. VANNESSA JIMENEZ (REUTERS)

After a long political career, the moment finally favored Gustavo Petro, who has just established himself as the first left-wing ruler of Colombia.

Multiple factors came together to facilitate this victory, but one of the main ones was the growing popular irritation with the bad government of President Duque, Álvaro Uribe's bishop, who in the midst of a pandemic that aggravated the already chronic problems of poverty and inequality, showed insensitivity and lack of connection with the needs of the majority, to the point of proposing an untimely tax reform that unleashed a social explosion of immense proportions, which was brutally quelled by the police forces.

Petro was one of the few politicians who understood the magnitude of the claim and knew how to support it opportunely,

But other things came together, little by little, to give him the opportunity of a lifetime: the lack of strength and unity of a center that failed to consolidate itself as a team or captivate an electorate to whom moderation says little in times of networks exalted and contained rage;

the gradual decline of Uribismo, and above all of a Uribe increasingly questioned by the justice system;

and the defeat of Federico Gutierrez, the traditional political candidate, who many believed to be his most important contender.

The most difficult, however, was yet to come, when the tide of the contest finally led him to face an

whose popularity grew unexpectedly and managed to captivate a good part of Colombian voters, to the point of turning the 2022 electoral campaign into one of the most uncertain, fierce, interesting and exhausting in recent decades.

Beating Rodolfo Hernández, the candidate who has just been defeated by Petro – but who obtained the not inconsiderable sum of 10 and a half million votes – did not seem like an easy task.

The former mayor of Bucaramanga - who "sold out" as a champion of corruption, although he is being prosecuted for corruption - embodies a very Trump-style populism, which combines rudeness, profanity, picturesqueness and arrogance, with a pragmatic and simplistic of the social problems, and a great ignorance of the country that was preparing to govern.

But it represents many other things that some Colombians admire: on the one hand, the myth of the tireless worker – who was also promoted by Uribe – productive, saver, who has been done “by hand”, and that of the businessman who generates employment, but also knows how to get rich and have a good life.

And also the model of boss-foreman who does not shake his pulse in front of his employees;

that of the male capable of violently threatening his enemy, of saying that the woman would be better off taking care of the children, of making jokes about prostitutes and women who take their husbands' clothes;

and of the politician who promises - like AMLO - to reduce the state apparatus to a minimum and save on everything that seems luxurious or expendable.

However, what really made Hernández a fearsome rival for Petro is that -whoever he was- he was the only hope of those who hate or fear Petro, and there are many: from the most recalcitrant right, made up of the members of the Democratic Center and many conservatives, even many businessmen and landowners and that part of the citizenry that associates it with the guerrillas, with Chávez, with Maduro;

and the one that, without fearing him, calls him demagogic, messianic, authoritarian, and bad administrator.

All those sectors came together trying to defeat him.

But Petro knew how to do it, appealing to whatever he was.

He slowly decaffeinated his speech, bringing it closer to a more moderate, less intimidating one, and filling it with

that seduce despite their high-sounding, like that of the world power of life, or the politics of love.

Knowing about the Catholicism of Colombians, he went to visit the pope, and in his first tweet as president he put together the words God and People, like that, with a capital letter.

His advisers advised him to dress more formally, more “executively”, and even his daughter Sofía gave him points with her intelligence and her beauty.

And, in terms of alliances, he accepted whatever it was.

While his rival rejected them all – in a false theatrical gesture of independence – he accepted any, from professional politicians of dubious reliability, to an anti-abortion pastor.

He even spoke at one point – seeing is believing – of joining Uribe.

But his great success was – after some hesitation, it must be said – to nominate Francia Márquez as vice president,

once it reached a huge vote within the Historical Pact.

France, a charismatic and brave Afro woman, but above all a true symbol of change, the proof that this country has made some progress in the conquest of equal opportunities, was definitive in her arrival to the presidency.

Two other factors helped him to reach the presidency: that faced with the prospect that a candidate as dangerously erratic as Hernández would come to govern Colombia, many respectable public figures – politicians, journalists, intellectuals and scientists – finally endorsed his candidacy.

And that, like Uribe, the enthusiasm of his followers has endowed him with a "teflon" that means that no scandal from those around him makes a dent in his prestige.

Neither the one that once related him to a tula full of bills, nor the one that his brother aroused when he went to jail to talk about social forgiveness with corrupt politicians, nor those that have caused his most delusional or impractical proposals like that of a train high that unites two extremes of the country.

Those who try to create fear of Petro by claiming that he was a guerrilla, are wrong.

On the contrary: in a country in urgent need of peace, where the Agreements have had so much resistance and are sabotaged day by day, it is necessary to celebrate that a demobilized has come to power.

Gustavo Petro, during the many years he was a senator, showed himself to be a brave man, who made important denunciations about the relationship between paramilitarism and politics and about extrajudicial executions at the hands of members of the army.

The fear may come from somewhere else.

That despite his intelligence, his political ability, and his social conscience, in his government he uses that quarrelsome tone and sometimes instigator of hatred and resentment that has been seen so many times, lighting fires where there is dry firewood.

Or that, stubborn and impulsive as he is,

despite his coldness, he insists on some of his delusional projects, derailing the economy.

In his speech – in my opinion a bit bombastic and vague – he spoke of uniting a Colombia that is still drastically divided.

Hopefully it doesn't stay on promise.

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