The two favourites are risky choices in different ways
EVERY afternoon in Samaná, a small coffee-growing town in the Colombian Andes, prosperous townspeople mount Paso Fino horses to ride from bar to bar, where they down shots of aguardiente, Colombia’s most popular tipple. Their tongues loosened by the anise-flavoured drink, they become garrulous on the subject of the country’s presidential election, the first round of which is scheduled for May 27th. Álvaro Uribe, a right-wing former president, “is a horseman just like us”, declares Brayan López, a horse-dealer. He, and almost everyone else in Samaná, it seems, will vote for Iván Duque, Mr Uribe’s protégé, who is leading in the polls.
As president from 2002 to 2010, Mr Uribe sent the army to expel from the area around Samaná the 47th Front, a unit of the FARC, a guerrilla group that had fought the state since 1964. The front’s leader, Elda Neyis Mosquera, known as “la negra Karina”, was one of the FARC’s few female commanders and is thought to have been one of its bloodiest. She turned herself in and is now, by Mr López’s account, an uribista. In all, some 220,000 people died in the war and perhaps 7m were displaced.
The presidential election is the first to take place after the war’s end. Juan Manuel Santos, who succeeded Mr Uribe as president, signed a peace accord with the FARC in 2016. The group disarmed last year. But the election is no celebration of peace, which has both disappointed Colombians and raised their expectations. Smaller armed groups have occupied some of the territory vacated by the FARC and cultivation of coca, over which they fight, has surged (see article). FARC members are now guaranteed seats in congress and face light punishment for their crimes. Mr Uribe was the peace accord’s most prominent critic. His ally is the front-runner in part because many Colombians wanted Mr Santos to take a much tougher line with the FARC.
But peace has also opened the door to the candidacy of Mr Uribe’s antithesis, Gustavo Petro, an ex-member of M19, another guerrilla group, and a former mayor of Bogotá. Polls suggest he is running second to Mr Duque, making him the first left-wing politician with a serious chance of becoming president. “By disarming the left, peace made the left capable of playing a role in politics,” says Eduardo Pizano of the University of the Andes in Bogotá.
Many Colombians find that terrifying. Mr Petro has in the past said nice things about Hugo Chávez, the late leader of next-door Venezuela, whose socialist regime is destroying its economy and democracy and driving thousands of refugees into Colombia. Investors look upon Mr Petro with “utter fear”, says an economist. That has bolstered Mr Duque, whose supporters accuse the left-wing candidate of plotting to bring Cuban-Venezuelan “castrochavismo” to Colombia.
Both candidates benefit from the popular rejection of Mr Santos, who is ending his presidency with an approval rating of just 14%. (He cannot run in this election.) Economic growth has been slow. Colombians resent Mr Santos, too, for raising their taxes. And they are fed up with an elitist style of politics that he seems to embody. His presidential campaign in 2010, and allegedly in 2014, accepted contributions from Odebrecht, a Brazilian construction firm that bribed parties and politicians across Latin America. (Mr Santos admits the contribution in 2010 but says he did not know about it.)
He is dragging down two other candidates: Germán Vargas Lleras, his former vice-president, and Humberto de la Calle, the chief negotiator of the peace accord. A third, Sergio Fajardo, a former mayor of Medellín and governor of the department of Antioquia, looks more like a candidate for change. But he is having trouble being heard above the sound and fury of the Duque-Petro clash.
Another orange president?
Colombia is doing better than most voters think. Its economy is recovering from a slowdown that began with a drop in the price of oil, its biggest export, in 2014. Mr Santos’s decision to raise VAT kept its ballooning budget deficit from expanding still further. Nearly 5m people have escaped poverty since 2009. Despite lawlessness in parts of the country, last year was the least violent in four decades. The Santos government helped pave Samaná’s only road link, points out the town’s mayor, Gloria Inés Ortíz.
Yet the polls, which should be treated with some scepticism, favour candidates who would yank Colombia off the course Mr Santos has set. Mr Duque and Mr Petro are leading in part because they took part in consultas (primaries), which coincided with a congressional election in March. They amassed millions of votes and drew media coverage away from other candidates. Mr Fajardo, the third candidate of change, “lost two months of message”, says Francisco Miranda, a political analyst. Both front-runners temper their radicalism by offering stirring visions of what post-war Colombia could become.
Mr Duque, the son of a prominent politician, has the difficult task of harnessing the enthusiasm for Mr Uribe in places like Samaná, while also appealing to voters who associate him with former right-wing paramilitary groups, a link he denies. Some voters fear that a President Duque would work to remove presidential term limits from the constitution, allowing Mr Uribe eventually to return to power. Chief of the Inter-American Development Bank’s culture division before he became a senator, Mr Duque has a thin CV for an aspiring president, which sharpens worries that he will be Mr Uribe’s puppet.
Mr Duque’s answer is to cast himself both as Uribe-light and as his own man. His demands for tougher treatment of FARC “kingpins” than the peace accord mandates and for forced eradication of coca are aimed at upholding the rule of law, not wrecking the agreement, he says. “Entrepreneurship” and “equity” would be the two other goals of his presidency. Promising to be the “first 21st-century president”, Mr Duque talks of an “orange economy”, based on talent and knowledge. To people who fear that his presidency will be a Trojan horse for Mr Uribe, he replies, “I’m just going to be Duque.”
Though the polls put him at least ten percentage points in front, he must worry about the passion roused by Mr Petro. Tens of thousands of fired-up supporters attended his closing campaign event on May 17th in the Plaza de Bolívar in Bogotá. Adherents of a martial-arts cult called the Sacred Tao Cristic Universal Church, clad in red-belted karate outfits, guarded the stage. The group has dubbed Mr Petro “Mahatmajustipol”, meaning “great soul who brings justice to the people”.
For young and poor Colombians who deem politics too grubby, the elites too smug and economic progress too slow, Mr Petro promises a “humane Colombia” with a much bigger role for the state in health, higher education, finance and business. More startlingly, he wants to pull Colombia out of oil and coal over the next ten years. It would be replaced by greener industries, such as agribusiness, he says.
Like Mr Duque, Mr Petro seeks to soothe voters who might take him for an extremist. “We’re progressives, not socialists,” says Hollman Morris, a Bogotá city councillor who is close to Mr Petro. He has no wish to emulate Venezuela’s “failed model”, says Mr Morris—which sounds less reassuring when he goes on to blame Venezuela’s dependence on oil, rather than its lunatic economic policies, for its woes.
Some of Mr Petro’s critics worry more about his high-handed managerial style than his ideology. As mayor of Bogotá from 2012 to 2015 he disregarded the city council, issued decrees and alienated allies. After a dispute over rubbish-collection contracts in 2012 left garbage piling up for three days, opposition parties launched a petition to recall him and the inspector-general ordered his removal from office. The Inter-American Human Rights Commission ordered his restoration.
Lower-risk candidates seem to be making little headway. Mr Vargas Lleras, a former housing minister with a record of getting things done, hopes his command of Colombia’s most effective political machine will deliver the votes that the polls say he lacks. Mr Fajardo, a mathematician who helped transform Medellín from a crime capital into a mecca of cool, promises political renewal. He will not pay “a peso for a single vote” or exchange government jobs for support in congress, he vows. His vision is as professorial as it is presidential: he hopes to rally a country that “has been united by fear” behind a project to develop its talent and technology.
The candidates’ enthusiasm for schemes to improve education helps address one of the country’s main problems: low productivity. Less is said about other ills, such as Colombia’s underdeveloped international trade, its relatively high government debt and its low level of tax revenue, which is largely consumed by pensions, interest payments and transfers to regional governments. Mr Duque shies away from admitting the need to increase income tax; Mr Petro promises to cut VAT.
If the polls are right, Mr Duque’s tough-talking modernity will defeat Mr Petro’s radicalism in a run-off on June 17th. That would be “the last chance for the economic and political establishment [to show] it is something in which all Colombians can be successful”, says Mr Pizano. If it fails, a leftist like Mr Petro could be next.