South America moves further to the left. In Colombia, Gustavo Petro won the presidential elections on Sunday. To Counting more than 99 percent of the ballot papers the ex-guerrilla and former mayor of Bogotá got just over 50 percent of the votes in the runoff. His opponent, the millionaire building contractor and populist regional politician Rodolfo Hernández, only got 47 percent.
This is the first time in Colombia’s history that a decidedly left-wing politician has taken over the presidency. This is a turning point for the country: election winner Petro promises a departure from the strongly business-friendly politics of the past decades. His government wants to set up and expand a welfare state and to tax the richest Colombians more heavily. “Today we are starting a new chapter in Colombia’s history,” Petro said during his victory celebration to cheering supporters in Bogotá.
At the same time, a larger trend continues with Petro’s victory: left-wing candidates have also recently been elected to office in Argentina, Bolivia, Peru and Chile. They promise more social justice in one of the regions of the world where wealth is distributed most unequally.
In Colombia, around 40 percent of the people live below the poverty line. If the situation was already tense before the Covid 19 pandemic, it has gotten even worse since then. In recent years there have been repeated, sometimes violent, mass demonstrations. They were sparked, for example, by tax increases, but then quickly turned against a political class that many Colombians perceive as aloof and elitist.
The candidate from the classic conservative establishment that has ruled Colombia for the past few decades was eliminated in the first round of the presidential elections. Together with Gustavo Petro, Rodolfo Hernández surprisingly entered the runoff election, a political outsider who had conducted his election campaign primarily via social networks and wanted to score points with the voters with the promise of a radical fight against corruption.
For a long time, the guerrilla war had made it almost impossible for left-wing candidates to win the elections
The atmosphere was extremely tense before the election. But shortly after the results of the counting of the majority of the votes were announced, Hernández publicly acknowledged his defeat: “I called Gustavo to congratulate him on his victory,” Hernández wrote on Twitter early Sunday evening (local time).
Petro’s victory is also remarkable because Colombia has been the scene of a bloody civil war between the army, right-wing paramilitaries and left-wing guerrilla organizations in recent decades. The war had made it almost impossible for left-wing candidates to succeed in elections. Gustavo Petro himself was part of one of these rebel groups, M-19, in his youth, but by 1990 they had laid down their arms and turned into a political party. Petro himself became a deputy and mayor of the capital Bogotá, but the stigma of left-wing guerrillas still clung to him. In 2010, when he first ran for president in his country, he finished a distant fourth.
In 2016, however, the government signed a peace treaty with one of the country’s largest rebel groups, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, FARC for short. In the end, this did not bring the peace for the country that many had hoped for, but for many, especially young Colombians, left-wing parties became an alternative in a political landscape otherwise dominated by conservative elites.
Vice-President-elect Francia Márquez will be the first Afro-Colombian to hold the post.
(Photo: Guillermo Legaria/Getty Images)
Francia Márquez, an academic, single mother and former domestic worker, who campaigned for environmental protection, feminism and the rights of indigenous people from an early age, is also entering the government with Gustavo Petro. Márquez will become the first Afro-Colombian to become her country’s vice president. After her victory, she remembered the activists and young demonstrators who were murdered in Colombia in recent years: “Thank you for going ahead and sowing the seeds of resistance and hope.” In many Colombian cities, supporters of Petro and Márquez took to the streets to celebrate their victory in the elections.
Gustavo Petro will take office as the new President of Colombia on August 7th. However, it will be difficult for his government to actually implement its ambitious goals politically. She plans to move away from the exploitation of fossil fuels such as coal and oil. However, these bring important income to the country, and it is unclear how their loss will be compensated for in the future. Petros party alliance, the Pacto Histórico por Colombiaalso commands only a small minority of votes in Congress.
The new government must also reconcile a deeply divided society, at the same time the economic leeway is very limited. The pandemic and the associated lockdowns have hit the country hard, many people are unemployed and inflation is eating away at wages. On top of all this there are also bloody conflicts with rebel groups that are still active and powerful drug cartels that have entire regions firmly under their control.