2022 Colombian presidential elections — First round analysis
The first round of the 2022 Colombian presidential elections was held on May 29. It was a truly historic election, perhaps a realigning moment in Colombian politics. It was an election which has broken with the old norms and traditions.
So, what happened? There’s a lot of things to say! In this first post, I focus on the analysis of the results and what happened. In a second post, I will discuss the runoff and the runoff campaign as it winds down. In future posts, I will discuss the electoral geography of the election in greater detail.
The results
Gustavo Petro, the candidate of the left-wing Pacto Histórico, finished first with 40.3% or 8.5 million votes.
Rodolfo Hernández, the populist outsider, was the surprise of the election, coming in second with 28.2% and nearly 6 million votes. Hernández had surged in the closing weeks of the campaign. He will face Petro in the second round on June 19.
Regardless of his ideological orientations (a mystery) or his newfound allies for the runoff, Hernández represented change and an anti-establishment option, different from Petro, for many voters. The two finalists are therefore both anti-establishment candidates (or at least present themselves as such) both offering some version of ‘change’.
Federico ‘Fico’ Gutiérrez, the candidate of the right-wing Equipo por Colombia coalition, finished third with 23.9% or 5 million votes. Until Hernández’s surge, Fico had been widely expected to finish second and face Petro is a more classic left/right runoff.
Fico Gutiérrez was considered the ‘continuity’ candidate, implicitly supported by President Iván Duque’s administration and the governing uribista Centro Democrático (CD). His first round elimination is a stunning defeat for uribismo and a clear sign that people voted for change.
Sergio Fajardo, the candidate of the centrist Centro Esperanza coalition, won just 4.2% and 885,000 votes.
John Milton Rodríguez, the candidate of the Christian evangelical right-wing Colombia Justa Libres, won 1.3% and 271,000 votes. Enrique Gómez, the candidate of the ultra-conservative Movimiento Salvación Nacional (MSN), got 0.2%. Ingrid Betancourt and Luis Pérez had dropped out before the election but their names remained on the ballot, and both got less than 0.1%. Finally, there were 365,000 blank votes (1.7%), which are considered valid votes.
Turnout was 54.97%, with 21.1 million votes cast, which is very high turnout for a Colombian presidential election. This is the highest turnout in the first round of a presidential election since 1974, slightly higher than the previous records in 1998 (54.7%) and 2018 (53.4%). Compared to four years ago, 1.6 million more voters participated.
There were major regional differences in the first round. Broadly speaking, Petro was dominant in Bogotá, the Caribbean and the Pacific as well as remote Amazonia. Rodolfo, on the other hand, was dominant in the eastern Andean (Santanderes, Cundinamarca, Boyacá) and southern-central Andean regions (Tolima, Huila), the Llanos Orientales or Orinoquía and parts of Amazonia (Caquetá, Guaviare). Fico was only dominant in Antioquia, while the Eje Cafetero (Caldas, Risaralda, Quindío) was essentially a three-way tie.
Gustavo Petro won over 70% of the vote or close to it in four departments: Chocó (72.5%), Putumayo (71%), Nariño (70.3%) and Cauca (69.9%). Rodolfo Hernández had a very strong favourite son vote in Santander (67%). Fico Gutiérrez only won in his native Antioquia with 48.9%, also by far his best result anywhere, and among expatriate voters abroad (45.1%). Sergio Fajardo did not break 10% anywhere. His best results were in Bogotá (7.9%) and abroad (7.7%).
Gustavo Petro: The bitter taste of victory
Gustavo Petro’s result is amazing for the left — 8.5 million votes, 40.3%, is a new record for the left. He won almost double the votes that he won four years ago in the first round (3.67 million more), when he placed second with 25.1% and 4.85 million votes. He even won more votes than he did four years in the runoff, where he got 8 million votes (but a slightly higher percentage share, 41.8%, than he did on May 29). In 2018 and now in 2022, Petro has won the two best results for the Colombian left in its entire history. Even if he ends up losing, he will have firmly established the Colombian left — so weak for much of its history — as a major political force to be reckoned with.
Ironically, however, this victory had a very bitter taste and was overshadowed by the fact that, for the first time in many months, Petro is no longer the clear favourite to win. His supporters were unsure whether they should celebrate an objectively great result, or feel anxious and worried about their candidate’s suddenly diminished chances of actually winning the presidency. The mood was very much subdued and somewhat confused, rather than celebratory.
Against Rodolfo Hernández, he faces an uphill battle to find another 10% from unlikely sources. To put a positive spin on things, Petro’s campaign say that they only need to find another 1.5 million votes to win, expecting that, with slightly lower turnout in three weeks, the winner will need 10 million votes. Even that, however, is easier said than done.
It is a rather incredible turn of events. For months, Petro was the anti-establishment candidate, the strongest and most vocal opponent to an unpopular right-wing administration, and practically the only candidate who had managed to capitalize on the widespread desire for change. Petro spent most of his campaign attacking the government, uribismo and the ‘neoliberal’ socioeconomic model. After his success in the primaries, he expected to face Fico Gutiérrez in a left/right, or change/continuity, runoff, where his anti-uribista and anti-government rhetoric could again be put to good use and where he could hope for a relatively comfortable (if still somewhat narrow) victory, on the back of a widespread desire for change.
Like most, Petro didn’t see Rodolfo Hernández coming. He wasn’t prepared for this runoff matchup, and his victory speech showed his confusion and uncertainty at how to adapt his strategy and discourse to the new reality.
Rodolfo Hernández is a whole different beast for Petro because he too is an anti-establishment ‘change’ candidate. Rodolfo’s version of change is different and he appeals to different people, as we’ll see, but he cannot convincingly be painted in the same ‘continuity’ category as Fico (whether or not Rodolfo as president would end up being more of the same is a whole different matter). Rodolfo may have a conservative mindset and he may be more right-wing in his ideas, but he is not an uribista, so Petro’s anti-uribista attacks are less effective against him.
Petro’s eternal problem is that he remains a polarizing figure, and with that comes a natural ceiling in the election. Petro has been a well-known figure in Colombian politics for over a decade now and the vast majority of voters have formed an opinion of him, good or bad. According to the Invamer poll, his favourability numbers have remained remarkably stable at about 40–43% since 2018, and his unfavourable numbers have not changed much either, generally staying between 39% and 44% since then. That means that despite many efforts to change those numbers, he hasn’t been able to shift people’s opinions of him.
A large chunk of the electorate will simply never vote for him. Petro comes with too much baggage: his guerrilla past (those who dislike him still pejoratively refer to him as a guerrillero), his controversial record as mayor of Bogotá, real doubts over his competence as an administrator, the perception that he is a dangerous ‘radical leftist’, fears that he would turn the country into ‘another Venezuela’ and anxiety about his economic platform (widespread among businessmen and investors).
Geographically, Petro was strongest largely in the same places he had done best back in 2018: the Pacific coast, the Caribbean and Bogotá (in the runoff).
Although he won just 24% in conservative Antioquia, that was a substantial improvement on both his first and second round results there in 2018 (9.3% and 22%).
Gustavo Petro finished first in many large cities— Bogotá, Cali, Barranquilla, Cartagena, Santa Marta, Montería, Valledupar, Manizales, Ibagué, Pereira, Pasto, Popayán, Neiva, Armenia, Palmira, Soledad and Soacha (among others).
In several of these cities (Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, Ibagué, the three capitals of the Eje Cafetero etc.), Fajardo had been first or second, often ahead of Petro, in 2018, which shows that many of Fajardo’s urban voters from four years ago voted for Petro this year. Indeed, Petro greatly improved on his 2018 first round results in several major cities.
While Petro did well in many cities, his support was otherwise strongest in coastal or peripheral regions of Colombia, outside of the Andean interior, like the Pacific and Caribbean coasts, as well as most of Amazonia (Amazonas, Vaupés, Guainía).
Broadly speaking, the Pacific and southwestern Andean region are more ethnically diverse (the Pacific coast, particularly Chocó, is predominantly Afro-Colombian, and there are large indigenous communities, particularly in Cauca), poorer (the Chocó is one of the poorest departments of Colombia), severely affected by continued violence and the conflict and largely ‘abandoned’ by the central government. Gustavo Petro, further helped this year by Francia Márquez, did extremely well among Afro-Colombian (70–80% in many heavily black cities like Buenaventura and Quibdó). He also did well among indigenous voters, particularly in the Cauca (over 90% in Toribío and Jambaló).
The Caribbean region, which has a strong regional identity, is culturally and socioeconomically distinct from inland (Andean) Colombia, and often feels neglected or overlooked by Bogotá. Gustavo Petro was born in Ciénaga de Oro (Córdoba), and although he grew up in Zipaquirá (Cundinamarca) he still plays on his costeño origins and benefits somewhat from a regional favourite son vote. There hasn’t been a president from the Caribbean since Rafael Núñez in the nineteenth century. In his victory speech, Petro urged the Caribbean to elect the first ‘progressive costeño president’…
The incredible success of Rodolfo Hernández
Undoubtedly, the phenomenon of the election was Rodolfo Hernández. With nearly 6 million votes (28.2%), he qualified for the second round against Gustavo Petro and beat Fico Gutiérrez into third place. In the second round, even if there remains a real element of unpredictability, Rodolfo Hernández has a slight edge, if only because it is much, much easier for him to find new votes, most notably from Fico.
Rodolfo Hernández languished in a distant third after being marginalized by the March primaries and congressional elections (from which he was almost entirely absent) and troubles in his campaign (the loss of his two Argentine strategists and a failed European tour in April). However, Rodolfo defied experts’ predictions and came up the middle as the tercería (third option), disrupting that Petro/Fico horserace narrative built by the media after March 13. Rodolfo Hernández was polling at 10% in March, moved up a bit to 12–15% in April and then had a rapid surge in the last 2/3 weeks of the campaign in May. The final polls, which stopped a week before the vote, all basically had him at 20–22%. Nevertheless, all but one poll still had him in third place behind Fico, although within striking distance in some polls (CNC).
However, as I said in my pre-election digest, the data showed that Rodolfo was in a sweet spot that any candidate would love to be in, with room to grow (his name recognition was lower than Petro and Fico, at most 70%), enviable favourability numbers (43% favourable vs. 10% unfavourable in the last pre-election Invamer poll) and with the most momentum going into the final week. Moreover, as I wrote, the perception of momentum going into the home stretch is quite important: it can make or break a candidate. Clearly, Rodolfo’s momentum kept building up during the final week (polling blackout), taking him from 20–22% to 28%.
Helpfully for Rodolfo, his surge took Petro and Fico by surprise and they were left scrambling, unsure how to respond: both needed to step up their attacks to stunt his growth, but both also had to limit their aggressiveness in case Rodolfo didn’t make it to the runoff and they needed his votes.
In addition, all the scrutiny and spotlights had been on Petro for months while Rodolfo got a ‘free ride’. As more left-wing analysts would point out, the right-leaning media (particularly publications like Semana) and the commentariat had spent months being quite critical of Petro and going after him for all his controversies or his more unrealistic ideas (notably the Buenaventura-Barranquilla overhead train) but gave Rodolfo a pass. Rodolfo’s unrealistic ideas (like developing the Magdalena River into something like the Rhine, or his dream to allow all Colombians to know about the sea) were ignored or brushed off as funny ideas. Rodolfo’s weaknesses, like his poor knowledge of certain policy issues (or even basic national geography — not knowing where Vichada was) and his pending corruption trial, were not the focus of much scrutiny in the first round. Unlike Petro’s weaknesses…
Comparing the polls to the result, CNC’s final poll (41 Petro, 24 Fico, 22 Rodolfo, 4.5 Fajardo, 6.6 blank vote) was among those closest to the final outcome. And interestingly, it suggests that Rodolfo Hernández’s gains in the last week came from undecided voters and blank votes (significantly overestimated by CNC at 6.6%, in reality below 2%), rather than Fico and Petro.
His success really is quite incredible — in an historical context, in a political context, in an electoral campaigns context — and unprecedented. In my biographical profile of Rodolfo here, I tried to explain just how unique he is and how his politics and electioneering make him so unusual.
In an historical and political context, firstly, Rodolfo Hernández doesn’t fit the traditional profile of Colombian presidents (or presidential candidates). Although he has held elected office as mayor, he is not a traditional career politician — unlike Petro, Fico and most former presidents. He does not come from a political family or dynasty — unlike Juan Manuel Santos, Andrés Pastrana, Alfonso López Michelsen and others. He is not supported by an established party or movement.
Rodolfo Hernández’s anti-establishment populism is far from unique. However, Colombia, sometimes characterized as an ‘oligarchic democracy’, stood out, at least until 2002, because of the absence or weakness of populism — in comparison to Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Argentina and Mexico. Colombia’s two strongest populist leaders in the 20th century were either killed (Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948) or prevented from taking power (former military dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla in 1970).
In a 2014 article, historian Daniel Pécaut wrote that “in Colombia everything is allowed, except populism”. He argues that the post-1958 political system and economic elites tolerated everything — drug trafficking, the armed conflict, corruption — to the extent that they prevent any outbreak of populism.
There are many similarities between Rodolfo and Álvaro Uribe’s rhetoric, particularly in Uribe’s first presidential campaign in 2002. Uribe, who famously said that the ‘the state of opinion’ being a superior form of the estado de derecho, often used populist language and behaved like a populist caudillo, but he dropped much of his anti-politiquería rhetoric after the failure of his ‘referendum against politiquería’ in 2003 and he started governing with and for the political establishment. However, Iván Duque, who represents a much more technocratic version of uribismo, has often used ‘populism’ in a pejorative sense, associated with authoritarianism and economic collapse (like in Venezuela). He’s often used the alleged dangers ‘populism’ as implicit attacks against Petro and the left.
In short, Rodolfo Hernández’s isn’t the first populist leader in Colombia, but his success as a ‘pure’ populist is remarkable in a country where the political and economic elites have given ‘populism’ a negative connotation for decades. That, of course, says a lot about the crisis of legitimacy and credibilty of the political and economic elites…
From an electoral campaigns context, Rodolfo Hernández’s success is also remarkable. He eschewed the usual mass political rallies in public squares (which Petro is good at) or even leafleting at intersections and in public spaces (a style pioneered by 1990s and early 2000s ‘alternative’ politicians like Fajardo). He attended debates in April and early May, but did not attend the three debates in the last week (whereas Petro, who had avoided debates since March, showed up), instead organizing a ‘debate of the people’ with his followers on Facebook. Instead, he had a very digital-based campaign, relying on Facebook (and, to a lesser extent, on TikTok), with word spreading online and through WhatsApp groups.
A recent article in La Silla Vacía explained in detail the online structure of Rodolfo’s campaign, comparing it to a multi-level network. An online platform, rodolfistas.com, allows supporters to register and join a local WhatsApp group. They are encouraged to refer and invite friends and family to join, which increases their status and level within the network — supporters are ranked nationally, departmentally and locally. The candidate monitors these networks and has used them to reach his top supporters directly, sometimes one-on-one. In late April, these WhatsApp groups coordinated local rodolfista caravans in cities and towns across the country, which helped rekindle Rodolfo’s campaign and fuel the final surge.
Through social media and other online platforms, Rodolfo was able to build a spontaneous, grassroots, organic base of rodolfistas across the country, which is an amazing feat (particularly in a country which never stood out for high levels of political engagement…). No presidential candidate has ever campaigned quite like this. Such an unconventional campaign would not have worked in 2010 or 2014 (and maybe not even in 2018).
The climate was ripe for anti-establishment populism. Trust in institutions is at record lows, satisfaction with democracy is among the lowest in Latin America and pessimism in the direction of the country abounds (over 80% believe things are worsening). However, according to the regular Invamer polls (see the most recent one from March 2022 here), Colombians have been quite pessimistic about the general direction of the country for about a decade now. What has changed?
The pandemic wiped out a decade’s worth of progress in reducing poverty and threw over 3.5 million people into poverty. According to the DANE, monetary poverty increased from 35.7% in 2019 to 42.5% in 2020 (in 2021, it dropped back down to 39.3%), with a steep increase in urban poverty (from 32% to 42% in municipal seats). This created an explosive social context which resulted in the estallido social of 2021 but also fragilized lower middle-classes who had escaped poverty in the past 10–20 years. During the pandemic, unemployment increased to 20.7% in May 2020 and has only very slowly recovered to pre-pandemic levels (11.5% in April 2022).
Politically, the government’s unpopularity — as well as the historic unpopularity of the current government’s political godfather, Álvaro Uribe — has realigned the political system away from the uribismo/anti-uribismo cleavage of the last 20 years and has created a political vacuum on the right. As I’ll explain later, Rodolfo Hernández predominantly filled a good chunk of that conservative/right-wing void.
Corruption has always been an issue in Colombia — after all, former President Julio César Turbay (1978–1982) infamously said that corruption needed to be reduced to its “fair proportions”. However, public indignation with corruption is far more recent. According to the regular Invamer poll which tracks public perception of the main problems facing the country since 2004, corruption only emerged as one of the top issues in 2017 (coinciding with the Odebrecht scandal).
Before then, during Álvaro Uribe’s two terms and Juan Manuel Santos’ first term, the economy/unemployment and security/public order were consistently the two major political issues in voters’ minds. The 2016 peace agreement did not bring peace, but it did reduce the salience of the internal conflict in most voters’ minds, outside of peripheral (forgotten) regions where the war rages on. The reduced importance of the internal conflict as a political issue allowed new issues, like corruption (but also the environment, education, healthcare, women’s rights, civil liberties etc.), to emerge as important political concerns.
In short, a perfect storm of favourable conditions allowed Rodolfo Hernández to emerge as the phenomenon of the first round.
Geographically, Rodolfo Hernández has a massive favourite son vote in Santander (the saying santandereano vota santandereano), where he won two-thirds of the vote, which spills over into Boyacá, northern Cundinamarca, parts of Norte de Santander, southern Cesar and the Magdalena Medio. Generally, Rodolfo is strong in the eastern Andean (Santanderes, Cundinamarca, Boyacá) and southern-central Andean regions (Tolima, Huila), as well as the Llanos Orientales (Orinoquía) and parts of Amazonia (Caquetá, Guaviare). There were a lot of derisive comments about the fact that Rodolfo won in Vichada, a department which he didn’t know existed.
Compared to Petro, Rodolfo is stronger ‘inland’ than on the coasts: his support in both the Caribbean and Pacific is quite weak. He is also generally weaker in the cities, although he surprised by placing second in Bogotá (with 22%), and stronger in small towns.
Rodolfo’s map, minus Antioquia, has a lot of similarities with uribista support in past elections (2018, 2014…) or the No vote in the 2016 plebiscite. His second best result was the oil producing department of Casanare (64.4%) in the Llanos, which is typically the most uribista department in Colombia, and he did well in other traditionally uribista departments like Meta, Arauca, Tolima, Huila and the Eje Cafetero (which was basically a three-way tie). Rodolfo Hernández won many uribistas and former uribistas. Evidently, a lot of people who had voted for Duque in 2018 voted for Rodolfo Hernández, particularly outside of Antioquia and the Caribbean. This doesn’t mean that Rodolfo is an uribista — he got to where he is after attacking Fico and Duque quite relentlessly — but it does mean that a lot of people who had supported uribismo in the past voted for Rodolfo this year.
Rodolfo himself might be hard to pin down ideologically, but his voters are largely conservative. As I wrote in my profile of him, Rodolfo has a fundamentally conservative mindset, in tune with the average Colombian voter, and he represents traditional values like authority, entrepreneurship (and thriftiness in business) and patriarchism.
Fico Gutiérrez’s stinging defeat
Fico Gutiérrez was undoubtedly one of the biggest losers of the first round. With 5 million votes and 23.9%, he finished in third place, 900,000 votes behind Rodolfo Hernández. In March, the right-wing primary got 4.1 million votes, 2.1 million of them for Fico.
Fico Gutiérrez was the candidate of the ‘traditional’ Colombian right and the ‘continuity’ candidate, with the implicit support of the government. His defeat is therefore a massive defeat for Iván Duque’s administration, the status-quo and the many political machines which were behind him. In other words, Colombians massively voted for change — they just disagree on the contents and direction of that change. Fico Gutiérrez paid the price.
Fico Gutiérrez, on paper, was actually a good candidate: young, good looking, friendly, likeable, strong paisa regional roots, a popular former mayor and few liabilities (only one major scandal to his name). An everyman, if you will. I have little doubt that Fico would have won in a year like 2018. His campaign wasn’t bad either: he knew that he needed to appeal to the centre and he remained on message, preaching ‘national unity’ and repeating that he didn’t see left or right but only ‘common sense’. His penchant for theatrics and showmanship didn’t help him much though, and mostly served as fodder for online memes.
However, Fico represented all that is unpopular in Colombian politics today: the government, uribismo and all the traditional parties and their machines.
President Iván Duque is very unpopular, with approval ratings in the low 20s since the 2021 protests according to the regular Invamer tracking poll (in four major cities only). Very few people are satisfied or optimistic about the country’s direction in general or on specific issues. It is interesting that Fico’s vote share (24%) is close to Duque’s approval…
Álvaro Uribe was, for years, the most popular political figure in Colombian politics and the dominant figure of the political system since 2002, but he became a more polarizing figure and now a genuinely unpopular figure (since 2018 and especially 2021). In the last Invamer poll, only 22% of respondents had a favourable opinion of Uribe.
This presidential campaign was indeed notable for the absence of uribismo. While nearly all uribistas supported Fico after the original uribista candidate, Óscar Iván Zuluaga, impetuously dropped out after the March 13 elections, the CD did not formally endorse Fico — which was in fact probably a favour to him, given that Uribe knows that it could have been the kiss of death. Fico Gutiérrez is very close to uribismo (he was widely rumoured to uribismo’s Plan B for months before Zuluaga dropped out) but he is not a diehard uribista loyalist (as he points out, he was elected mayor of Medellín in 2015 against an uribista candidate). During his campaign, he took his distances with uribismo and Duque on some issues: he repeatedly said that he voted Yes in the 2016 plebiscite, and he supported implementing the peace agreement and even showed some willingness to open peace talks with the ELN.
Fico Gutiérrez had the official support of the Conservative Party and the Partido de la U (two ‘machine parties’), as well as most of the Liberal Party’s congressmen and a good chunk of Cambio Radical (CR). He was supported by the vast majority of the biggest political clans in Colombia and their clientelist machines, including the Char dynasty, the Blel clan (Bolívar), Dilian Francisca Toro (Valle), Óscar Barreto (Tolima), David Barguil (Córdoba) and many others. Unlike Iván Duque in 2018 (who received machines only through the back door), Fico openly welcomed them (including ones led by parapolíticos or with scandals to their names) and his campaign relied on their machines to organize events for him in their regions, notably in the Caribbean, and to get out the vote. In Barranquilla, for example, the Char clan introduced him to the moving parts of their powerful machine and they organized a mass event for him in late April. In short, Fico was the candidate of the establishment.
Machines, however, no longer work very well in presidential elections. Germán Vargas Lleras’ disastrous performance in 2018 was the clearest indicator of that. Presidential elections are not about structures and machines, they’re about emotions. Rodolfo Hernández and Gustavo Petro are masters at selling emotions, but Fico wasn’t.
Yet, for whatever reason, Fico’s campaign had a blind faith that the machines would come through for him, or at least would be enough to push him through into the runoff. They didn’t. The machines largely stayed quiet on May 29: they didn’t bus in voters as they do in congressional elections, few local ‘leaders’ were working and there were no widespread claims of vote buying. Machines usually do not operate as much in presidential elections as they do in congressional elections, and they will only operate in presidential elections if they receive money. Fico’s campaign didn’t give too much money to the political structures backing him in the regions. In addition, in regions where Petro is strong, like the Caribbean, the machines were probably also worried that it could backfire: even if they bused people in to vote, they’d just vote for Petro.
Fico’s campaign from the very beginning was about presenting him as the anti-Petro candidate. That helped him win the right-wing primary in a landslide with over 2 million votes. It helped him become Petro’s main rival after the primaries, consolidating the right-wing vote behind him. But then his campaign stagnated and was unable to find a way to grow — the anti-Petro attacks had probably run their course. He struggled to define himself and his campaign as something other than ‘anti-Petro’ or with vague meaningless labels (like ‘el de la gente’).
Fico could make a case as the anti-Petro candidate when he was a solid second in the polls and was within striking distance of victory in runoff matchups. His case as the anti-Petro candidate suddenly got a lot weaker with Rodolfo’s surge, and with the polls that showed Rodolfo doing better against Petro in a runoff than Fico. Suddenly, Fico was no longer the obvious anti-Petro choice.
Fatally, he ignored Rodolfo until it was too late. On the other hand, Rodolfo definitely didn’t ignore Fico — in fact, while Rodolfo seldom went after Petro in the first round, he focused all of his attacks on Fico. He said that Fico isn’t Fico but rather the sum of Uribe, César Gaviria, Barguil, Dilian Francisca Toro and Andrés Pastrana. He called Fico a thinner and hairier version of Iván Duque.
To summarize, Fico paid the price for the government and uribismo’s unpopularity. He was unable to build a convincing message that fit with the dominant emotion in the first round, the demand for change, and never shook off the perception that he was the establishment and continuity candidate.
Fico only won a single department: his native Antioquia, where he got 49%, not far from Duque’s 53% four years ago. In Medellín, where he was a popular mayor for four years, he won 53.6%. His support in Antioquia did spillover somewhat into the culturally similar Eje Cafetero, winning just over 30% in Caldas and Quindío.
Fico also won among Colombian voters abroad (with 45%), thanks to heavy support among Colombians in the United States (64.5%).
Fico did relatively well in the Caribbean, winning between 26% and 30% in most departments, largely thanks to the support he had from the region’s political machines, like the Char clan (Atlántico), former Conservative presidential candidate David Barguil (Córdoba) and the Blel clan (Bolívar). This machine support, as previously mentioned, was quite minimal and insufficient for him electorally. For example, in Córdoba (Barguil) and Atlántico (Char), Fico got fewer votes than the Equipo por Colombia primary had in March.
In the major cities, Fico’s support was concentrated in the most affluent neighbourhoods — for example, the localities of Usaquén and Chapinero in northern Bogotá, the only two localities not to vote for Petro in the capital.
Sergio Fajardo: the final debacle
The centrist candidate, Sergio Fajardo, suffered a real debacle: he won only 885,000 votes and 4.2%, a very distant fourth place. The writing was on the wall for him: the last polls were very bad, the trends going into the election were bad and the bottom was falling out from under his campaign.
His result is very bad even compared to the poor results of the Centro Esperanza’s primary in March. Back then, the low-turnout centrist primary got 2.28 million votes and Fajardo won the primary with 723,000 votes. About 1.3 million voters who had participated in the centrist primary in March didn’t vote for him, and assuming all of his primary voters still voted for him, he only got a paltry 162,000 additional votes to his own name since March.
Fajardo entered the first round campaign already badly weakened by the Centro Esperanza’s flop in the primaries. He never recovered. I explained some of the reasons behind the centrist coalition’s failure in my analysis of the March 13 results here. The centrist coalition was never able to overcome its internal divisions and contradictions to offer a cohesive centrist vision, and just became a sad mess of oversized egos who couldn’t help but squabble amongst themselves, in the public eye. The centrist coalition was a dysfunctional mess of rivals with competing ambitions and long-term objectives. Fajardo tried to put some order into it, but he was unable to really unite the centre or expand his campaign to include more political sectors. As his fledgling campaign stumbled to the end, some supporters publicly defected (to Petro and Rodolfo) and the different politicians in the coalition started to focus on the runoff, leaving Fajardo alone.
Sergio Fajardo came within 261,000 votes of qualifying for the second round in 2018. 2022 was supposed to be the year he would make the runoff and win. However, Fajardo played his cards very poorly since 2018. Right after the first round in 2018 and the weekend before the runoff, Fajardo went to see the whales in the Pacific Ocean. He announced that he would vote blank in the Petro/Duque runoff. His blank vote was a perfectly valid choice, but his runoff and the whales trip reinforced the image of him as indecisive and ‘lukewarm’ (tibio). The blank vote and the whales episode earned him the enmity of petrismo for the next four years: Petro and his supporters have never forgiven him for it. In 2021, Fajardo admitted that it was a mistake to go see the whales in 2018.
In April 2021, when the massive protests against Duque’s tax reform proposal began, Fajardo asked protesters to look for other ways to protest to avoid spreading COVID-19. Given the explosive social context, Fajardo’s message was very tone deaf, excessively conciliatory and seen as a of complacency with the status-quo. Petro was criticized by the right for his behaviour during the protests, but in the end he capitalized on the indignation and it has served him well. Fajardo misread the moment and let it go past him, allowing Petro to consolidate himself as the opponent to the Duque administration.
Fajardo has made education one of the main concerns in his political life, and a key policy issue in all his campaigns. However, during the pandemic, when Colombia had some of the longest school closures anywhere in the world (students only returned to full-time, in-class learning in January 2022) and while education experts were urging for a return to in-person learning, Fajardo was largely absent. Again, he missed the moment.
In general, Fajardo and the centrists misread the popular mood. After the protests, the pandemic, the recession, the explosive social context and the crisis in democratic institutions, voters are eager for more radical change. Fajardo remained stuck on the old message on cautious change, respectful of institutional norms and procedures, distant from the extremes.
In addition, after 2018 (and a failed presidential bid in 2010 which ended with him becoming Antanas Mockus’ running mate), Fajardo is no longer a political outsider or a fresh face: he’s become part of the political landscape, almost ‘the guy who comes back every four years to run for president’.
In 2018, Fajardo was the almost successful tercería (third option) and the choice against polarization between the extremes (uribismo and Petro at the time). His hope, and the stated objective of the Centro Esperanza, was to become the tercería again. However, it was Rodolfo Hernández who stole the tercería label away from him by appealing to voters’ emotions much more effectively. Fajardo’s rhetoric of no todo vale, politics with principles and ethics and so forth is stale now — it’s a political discourse that has been around since Mockus’s Ola Verde in 2010. On the other hand, Rodolfo’s disruptive and bombastic anti-system rhetoric appealed to voters’ emotions, in the current context, much more effectively. Rodolfo Hernández has also presented himself as the only candidate who can unite the country, against the divisions which have polarized the country and the past hatreds.
Already seriously handicapped by the Centro Esperanza’s belly flop in March, Fajardo failed to excite anyone and his campaign kept losing steam in April and May, while Rodolfo became the third man in the race.
Sergio Fajardo didn’t break 10% in any department, let alone win anywhere. His best results were in Bogotá (8%), among expats (7.7%) and Caldas (6.4%). As previously mentioned, a lot of his 2018 voters went over to Petro this year, particularly in big cities like Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, Pereira and Manizales.
His remaining voters are disproportionately concentrated in the major cities of the Andean interior and from the ‘elites’ (highly educated, wealthy). In the cities, it’s striking how Fajardo’s 2022 support correlates closely to Fico’s support (which is, in turn, correlated to wealth). This is not very surprising: those who stuck with Fajardo until the very end in 2022 were educated, upper middle-class liberal urbanites, still lukewarm about Petro (and a bit anxious about a populist disrupter like Rodolfo) and still attracted to Fajardo’s old rhetoric of no todo vale and with the perception that he had the most ‘solid’, fleshed-out and realistic platform among all the candidates.
First conclusions
This election isn’t over yet, far from it. The runoff is still up in the air, promising to be a close race. Regardless of who wins, it will have been a realigning moment in Colombian politics.
Rodolfo and Petro are both anti-establishment figures and represent a clear break from Colombian politics over the past 20 years (and more) and past presidents.
Petro, a former M-19 guerrilla member who demobilized in the early 1990s, is a left-winger who would be the first left-wing president ever elected. That in and of itself is enough to panic a lot of people: not only because of the country’s own history (with the left often associated to guerrillas and stigmatized) but also because of the ever-looming specter of Venezuela next door. Petro proposes major changes to Colombia’s social and economic system, notably the neoliberal and extractivist economic model, which inspires his supporters but scares and worries his critics. His critics are also wary of him because of his poor record as an ‘administrator’ or executive, demonstrated by his difficult time as mayor of Bogotá.
Rodolfo Hernández is a successful businessman whose political experience is limited to one term as mayor (2016–2019) and stints as city councillors (1970s, 1990s) which he did not care about. While he doesn’t propose significant changes to the social and economic system, his anti-corruption and anti-establishment rhetoric targets a political system and political elite accused of robbing the country blind. Coming from the private sector and hostile to the traditional ways of ‘doing politics’, his critics worry that he would be an unpredictable populist with little respect for the rule of law and democratic institutions, like Nayib Bukele, Jair Bolsonaro or Donald Trump. Indeed, he’s often expressed his contempt (or, at best, his disinterest) in institutions like the Congress.
Both Petro and Rodolfo could be considered populists: one a left-wing populist, the other a ‘pure’ (or maybe right-wing) populist. A populist president is nothing new for most Latin American countries, but for Colombia that’s still a bit new (even though Álvaro Uribe was a populist leader) and a shift in the political culture. As populists, both Petro and Rodolfo appeal to ‘the people’ (their pueblos are different, though), over and above institutions, particularly when they’ve been blocked by other institutions.
Therefore, both candidates bring with them a lot of uncertainties as to how they’d govern: how they would pass their agenda through a Congress in which neither has a majority, how they’d deal with setbacks and roadblocks to their agenda by the judicial and legislative branches, how their policies would impact the political system and the economy, how they’d implement or administer existing policies and their own agendas, and so forth.
Very interesting times ahead…
In a second post very soon, I’ll discuss the runoff campaign and what to expect for the runoff on Sunday June 19.
