What a mess
How to shrink the current 20-plus presidential pool to five, and then two? That is the point of the three rounds of voting on March 13th, May 29th and June 19th. Indeed, poll leaders Gustavo Petro and Rodolfo Hernández will have an almost sure spot in the first round. Next comes Oscar Iván Zuluaga (OIZ), the uribista candidate. He decided against joining forces with Equipo por Colombia (ExC), the center-right coalition, and kept running solo.
Nobody knows whether the Liberals will indeed vote for ExC once the Centro Democrático has been rejected. Politicians play a continuous game of soul-searching and realignment. Hopefully in the next two to three weeks we (and they) will see the light at the end of the tunnel. What a mess. Hernández is the rising star of this presidential race. In the polls he shows an impressive rising favorability, and a consistent second or third place. His simple anti-corruption message resonates with almost everyone. It’s difficult to assess his chances of reaching the second round. Polls favor Petro and the far-left coalition Pacto Histórico (PH) for now.
President Iván Duque’s stump speech nowadays follows this template: in 2019 Colombia was doing great. Then came COVID-19 with its humongous challenges, and this government overcame them, spreading expenditure all over the place (20 slides show happiness in recipients’ faces). Now Colombia is one of the most successful countries, near to overcoming pandemic and recession. So, everything seems great. Right? When explaining why the most anti-Duque candidates, namely Petro and Hernández, lead in the polls, it is crucial to understand that people in the street probably consider Duque’s rosy picture as over-emphasizing the visible good part of the iceberg, and neglecting the sunk portion, composed of the substantial suffering felt by ordinary people. The post-COVID-19 economy has rebounded, but only for the large cities and the formal economy. The president’s power-pointing of his administration’s amazing achievements just seems to add insult to injury. There is a disconnect between what champions of industry, economic analysts and government officials claim to be the situation in Colombia, and what maddens people in the streets. Petro and Hernández are the manifestation of the latter.
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