It was after a gutter campaign that Gustavo Petro, the candidate of the left-wing Pacto historico coalition, was elected the new president of Colombia.
He succeeds Ivan Duque, a head of state who, despite the support of Alvaro Uribe, never managed to take on the mantle of president.
Gustavo Petro, a former M19 guerrilla who became senator mayor of Bogota, comes to power at the age of 69 in a Colombia that the Covid-19 pandemic has deeply marked, amplifying the already very strong social inequalities in the country.
To discover
LIVE - Follow the latest information the day after the second round
Find all the results of the legislative elections
Gustavo Petro, who was opposed to Rodolfo Hernandez during this second round of the presidential election, collected 50.44% of the votes, when his opponent obtained 47.31%.
They both represented the desire for rupture expressed by the Colombians.
Rodolfo Hernandez is a billionaire who made his fortune in real estate and was mayor of Bucaramanga.
Without the support of any apparatus, he managed to qualify for the second round by showing his refusal to ally himself with the traditional political parties.
By declaring himself the king of the fight against corruption, Rodolfo Hernandez, who is suspected in a case of public contracts, managed to beat all the candidates from the traditional right and centre.
An atypical candidate, he used his outspokenness as proof of his closeness to the population, shocking the elites of Bogota,
Pressed on what support he would accept as he refused to make deals with mainstream parties, he said:
“I accept the support of the Virgin Mary and all the whores in her neighborhood
.
For
the average Colombian, this statement was not shocking, but his opponents wanted to exploit it to demand his excommunication.
The campaign turned sordid when some accused him of not paying the ransom for his daughter Juliana, kidnapped by an armed group, because she was an adopted daughter.
"We are committed to real change, real change
," declared Gustavo Petro on the evening of his victory.
The government that will take office on August 7 will be one of life, peace, social justice and environmental justice.
Its vice-president is Francia Marquez, a woman of Afro-Colombian origin.
She is an environmental activist and feminist, single mother, who asserts her modest background, always dressed in very colorful fabrics.
“We have taken an important step.
We have a government of the people, a government of people who go on foot, a government for those who are nothing (…) Together we will reconcile this nation in joy and peace.”
Gustavo Petro's first challenge will be to apply the peace agreements signed with the FARC in November 2016. His predecessor, Ivan Duque, showed no zeal in applying these agreements and even seemed to want to torpedo them at times.
It must be said that his mentor, Alvaro Uribe, has constantly denounced them as a capitulation to the guerrillas.
Many points of these agreements have remained a dead letter.
In particular, they provided for a strong commitment by the State in the regions “
liberated”
from the presence of the FARC.
In the end, mafia groups, rather than the state, occupied the ground in the face of the Duque government's passivity, nature abhors a vacuum in Colombia too.
Read also
Colombia: the heroic fight of social leaders
Gustavo Petro will also have to initiate the ecological transition, a subject totally ignored by his predecessor.
He announced that once elected, he would put an end to oil prospecting and coal production projects and that he would develop solar and wind energy.
Colombia is a major oil and coal exporter.
Gustavo Petro will also have to respond to the strong social demand expressed during the demonstrations, sometimes violent, which brought the country to a halt for long weeks, in 2020 and 2021. Social demands are strong in this Colombia with a prosperous economy , but more than half of the population lives below the poverty line.
The transformation of the Farc into a political party put an end to the stigmatization suffered by all those declaring themselves to be on the left.
This is probably one of the essential elements that allowed Gustavo Petro's victory.
Mafia groups
Gustavo Petro is accused by the Colombian right of being a "Castro-Chavista", that is to say an ally of the Cuban and Venezuelan regimes.
This accusation weighed, knowing that more than 1 million Venezuelans currently live in Colombia, having fled the terrifying economic and political crisis that their country is undergoing.
But if Gustavo Petro has a guerrilla past, he has gone far beyond the Trotskyist discourse of his first political commitments.
If he made mistakes as mayor of Bogota, he applied to the Colombian capital a management that seems very wise in view of the accusations of leftism that weigh on him.
Still, Gustavo Petro will have to lead the country with a Parliament that is hostile to him and within which he will have to make ad hoc alliances.
But Gustavo Petro does not have the profile of a man of dialogue.
Often provocative, he is used to maintaining controversy rather than seeking consensus.
Corruption is a phenomenon that has undermined Colombia for years.
If Gustavo Petro's opponent, Rodolfo Hernandez appeared as a destroyer of this evil, a procedure was launched against him on the award of a public contract.
In the entourage of Gustavo Petro, several people are suspected of having dirty hands: his close advisers, Roy Barreras or Armando Benedetti, are implicated in corruption cases.
In the fight against mafia groups that finance themselves through cocaine trafficking, Gustavo Petro's program remains unclear.
It is however the most important subject which will determine if the Colombian State is able to reconquer the Colombian territorial integrity.
