Santos and Peñalosa to the run-off

COLOMBIA - In Brief 17 Mar 2014 by Andres Escobar

Datexco published a new poll on March 16th, showing again that President Santos is expected to get the most votes in the May 25th presidential election (25.5%), but not enough to avoid a run-off three weeks later. However, two other results are surprising. The first one is that Enrique Peñalosa should come in second (with 17.1% of the votes), ahead of Oscar Iván Zuluaga (14.6%) and Martha Lucía Ramírez (7.7%). The second one is that Mr. Peñalosa should beat President Santos in the run-off (40.4% v. 37.1%). While this is quite an unexpected result, one should keep in mind that Datexco's predictions in the 2010 presidential election missed by an important margin. The reason back then was that middle-class youngsters living in large urban centers were over-represented in Datexco's sample... and it looks like it is the case again for the poll published yesterday. While this does not mean that Datexco's results should just be disregarded, it might be wise to wait for other polls to confirm or contradict this result before jumping to conclusions about drastic changes in Colombia's political landscape.

Now read on...

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