What happened on May 27?
The most amazing thing about this presidential election was that results were crystal clear one hour after voting time was up. The second one was a clear differentiation between winners and losers, that we show in Table 1.
Turnout at 53% was impressive by Colombian standards (see Figure 1), something that legitimizes Colombian democratic institutions. For this reason, we consider voters and democracy as clear winners. Naturally, Duque, Petro and Fajardo came out as winners, although for Fajardo is a sad victory. However, he will be key in the run-off. This is the first time in Colombian elections that two center-left options obtain more than 9 million votes altogether, therefore we consider the left also a winner. In the ideology versus machinery dilemma, the former came out as clear winner since the extremes were favored.
Pollsters except the firm Cifras&Conceptos’ so-called “prediction model”, were spot-on on most candidates. Fajardo was rising at the end and, therefore, his percentage was difficult to predict. Finally, African-Colombians and aboriginal communities, with considerable importance in some of the provinces where Petro won, made their voices be heard as never before. Indeed, Colombia’s economic geography is characterized by an affluent core surrounded by a ring of poverty; those poor regions of the periphery, namely, Putumayo, Nariño, Cauca, Chocó, Córdoba, Sucre and La Guajira, gave Petro a definitive support.
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