The pools to choose Gustavo Petro's successor began more or less the day after his election.
In the Colombian power centers there is a perpetual electoral pre-campaign in which the same names rotate in a kind of improvised casting that submits to the will of those who sit down to dine at the same tables in the same restaurants in the same clubs. from Bogota.
The name of the director of Semana
magazine
, Vicky Dávila, was part of those after-dinner conversations.
With a disoriented right and without a clear opposition leader, the journalist has become in recent months the true scourge of the president, a kind of guru for the most anti-Petrist sector.
If Dávila's intention was to uncover an electoral letter in the future we will never know.
The story of his possible political candidacy has been precipitated and all the lights are now focused on the journalist turned news item.
She, for now, has not clearly denied it at any time.
It was the former mayor of the capital, Claudia López - whose pre-candidacy for the 2026 elections is already taken for granted - who pointed it out last week in an exchange between the two full of resentment that has been escalating day by day.
López has broken the silence in which he had taken refuge this year at Harvard (United States) to explode what could be the big political news of the year.
The former mayor felt attacked by Dávila when he accused her of being responsible for the wave of violence experienced in the capital, with hitmen and robberies of restaurants in broad daylight in the north of the city.
“Good luck in the campaign Vicky.
That you do it from the front, without covers and without a mask.
With Uribe's votes and Gilinsky's money, go for your first public job,” the former mayor tweeted.
Candidate Vicky, do not avoid the implicit question I am asking you: when do you launch your campaign?
Or do you deny that you are a candidate?
I am happy to respond to your concern.
I was the one who invested the least in public information about the results of the Mayor's Office and in any case half of… https://t.co/GjihUYhVUw pic.twitter.com/WHR7L7CPdj
— Claudia López Hernández (@ClaudiaLopez) February 21, 2024
Dávila clung to her role as a journalist to try to direct the conversation elsewhere, but the insistence of one against the other made them both fall into the same political game.
The
Semana
director even echoed a poll launched on the social network X by journalist Daniel Samper about who would be the favorite to occupy the Casa de Nariño.
“This must have Claudia López upset.
In an X poll by Daniel Samper Ospina, she beat the former mayor 64% to 36%.
I am a journalist.
She, a failed Petrist professional politician.
I already understand the attacks and the desperation,” Dávila said.
This must have Claudia López upset.
In an X poll by Daniel Samper Ospina, he beat the former mayor 64% to 36%.
I am a journalist.
She, a failed Petrist professional politician.
I already understand the attacks and desperation.
pic.twitter.com/La4uo8AJEG
— Vicky Dávila (@VickyDavilaH) February 25, 2024
At this point there are still two long years until the 2026 elections, more than enough time to burn any candidate who decides to jump into the political crusher ahead of time.
For this reason, López decided to leave the mayor's office in January to study a one-year postgraduate degree in Boston, from where it is said that he is organizing his presidential career out of the spotlight.
If his intention was to go unnoticed, this week he decided to go on the attack.
The latest polls show a shift to the right among the Colombian electorate.
The mistakes of the Petro Government and the decline in the president's popularity have become more pronounced in recent months.
López, who at the end of the last presidential campaign supported the leader of the left, soon distanced himself from an increasingly lonely Petro, with the intention of supporting a future centrist candidacy.
Among the right, for its part, they are anxiously searching for a figure who can capitalize on conservative discontent.
Vicky Dávila, who has almost four million followers on Twitter, never let herself be carried away by the illusion of change that a moderate sector joined with the arrival of Petro to power.
From her magazine she gave full support to Rodolfo Hernández, the Trumpist and
outsider
businessman who burst into the campaign and made things difficult for the left.
Many analysts still maintain today that if it had not been for an end to the campaign that was as erratic as it was incomprehensible - in which the businessman disappeared from the stage and hid in his mansion on the coast - he could have been president.
Now, Dávila could play that
outsider
role that has given such good results in other countries in the region.
The journalist is in charge of a magazine owned by the Gilinskis, a group of Colombian businessmen who have burst into the Colombian market in recent years and have made an incursion into the world of media.
Its business and economic power is immense.
Her media power, too.
The journalist María Jimena Duzán published a column in
Cambio
this Sunday echoing the controversy: “A few months ago I wrote a column titled “Gabriel Gilinski, head of the opposition.”
I made a mistake.
The real tigress on the right is called Vicky Dávila.
She took off her mask and, although she has not said it, she is going for the Casa de Nariño.”
Dávila responded heatedly: “I'm not going to shut up, they're not going to shut me up.
“God takes care of me and protects me.”
The battle towards 2026 has just begun.
New names are making their way into the tables of power.
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