BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Colombia’s political panorama has shifted remarkably in a matter of 24 hours.
For months, pollsters predicted that Gustavo Petro, a former rebel-turned-senator making a bid to be the nation’s first leftist president, would head to a June presidential runoff towards Federico Gutiérrez, a conservative institution candidate who had argued {that a} vote for Mr. Petro amounted to “a leap into the void.’’
Instead, on Sunday, voters gave the top two spots to Mr. Petro and Rodolfo Hernández, a former mayor and wealthy businessman with a populist, anti-corruption platform whose outsider status, incendiary statements and single-issue approach to politics have earned him comparisons to Donald Trump.
The vote — for a leftist who has made a career assailing the conservative political class and for a relatively unknown candidate with no formal party backing — represented a repudiation of the conservative establishment that has governed Colombia for generations.
But it also remade the political calculus for Mr. Petro. Now, it is Mr. Petro who is billing himself as the safe change, and Mr. Hernández as the dangerous leap into the void.
“There are changes that are not changes,” Mr. Petro mentioned at a marketing campaign occasion on Sunday evening, “they are suicides.”
Mr. Hernández as soon as known as himself a follower of Adolf Hitler, has advised combining main ministries to economize, and says that as president he plans to declare a state of emergency to cope with corruption, resulting in fears that he may shut down Congress or droop mayors.
Still, Colombia’s right-wing institution has begun lining up behind him, bringing lots of their votes with them, and making a win for Mr. Petro appear to be an uphill climb.
On Sunday, Mr. Gutiérrez, a former mayor of Medellín, the nation’s second-largest metropolis, threw his help behind Mr. Hernández, saying his intention was to “safeguard democracy.”
But Fernando Posada, a political scientist, mentioned the transfer was additionally the institution proper’s last-ditch effort to dam Mr. Petro, whose plan to remake the Colombian economic system “puts at risk many of the interests of the traditional political class.”
“The Colombian right has reached such an extremely disastrous stage,” mentioned Mr. Posada, “that they prefer a government that offers them nothing as long as it is not Petro.”
Mr. Hernández, who had gained restricted consideration in many of the nation till just some weeks in the past, is a one-time mayor of the mid-sized metropolis of Bucaramanga within the northern a part of the nation. He made his fortune in development, constructing low-income housing within the Nineties.
At 77, Mr. Hernández constructed a lot of his help on TikTok, as soon as slapped a metropolis councilman on digital camera and just lately informed The Washington Post that he had a “messianic” impact on his supporters, who he in comparison with the “brainwashed” hijackers who destroyed the dual towers on 9/11.
Pressed on whether or not such a comparability was problematic, he rejected the concept. “What I’m comparing is that after you get into that state, you don’t change your position. You don’t change it.”
Until just some days in the past, Colombia’s political narrative appeared easy: For generations, politics had been dominated by a couple of rich households, and extra just lately, by a hard-line conservatism often known as Uribismo, based by the nation’s highly effective political kingmaker, former president Álvaro Uribe.
But voter frustration with poverty, inequality and insecurity, which was exacerbated by the pandemic, together with a rising acceptance of the left following the nation’s 2016 peace course of with its largest insurgent group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, appeared to shift the dynamic.
By 2022, Mr. Petro, lengthy the combative face of the Colombian left, thought it was his second. And within the months resulting in the May 29 election, voters flocked to his proposals — a broad enlargement of social applications, a halt to all new oil drilling in a rustic depending on oil exports, and a give attention to social justice.
The story line was: left versus proper, change versus continuity, the elite versus the remainder of the nation.
But Mr. Hernández’s inconceivable rise displays each a rejection of the conservative elite and of Mr. Petro.
It additionally reveals that the narrative was by no means so easy.
Mr. Hernández, who gained 28 p.c of the vote, has attracted a broad swath of voters anticipating change who may by no means get on board with Mr. Petro.
Mr. Petro is a former member of a insurgent group known as the M-19 in a rustic the place rebels terrorized the inhabitants for many years. And he’s a leftist in a nation that shares a border with Venezuela, a rustic plunged right into a humanitarian disaster by authoritarians who declare the leftist banner.
Mr. Hernández, together with his fuzzy orange hair and businessman’s method to politics, has additionally attracted voters who say they need somebody with Trumpian ambition, and should not troubled if he’s liable to tactlessness. (Years after saying he was a follower of Adolf Hitler, Mr. Hernández clarified that he meant to say he was a follower of Albert Einstein.)
Two of the nation’s greatest points are poverty and lack of alternative, and Mr. Hernández appeals to individuals who say he will help them escape each.
“I think that he looks at Colombia as a possibility of growth. And that’s how I think that he differs from the other candidates,” mentioned Salvador Rizo, 26, a tech marketing consultant in Medellín. “I think that the other candidates are watching a house that is on fire and they want to extinguish that fire and reveal the house. What I think the view of Rodolfo is: That there’s a house that can be a massive hotel in the future.”
He has additionally been a relentless critic of corruption, a power subject that some Colombians name a most cancers.
Early on, he made a pledge to not take marketing campaign cash from non-public entities, and says he’s funding his presidential bid himself.
“Political people steal shamelessly,” mentioned Álvaro Mejía, 29, who runs a photo voltaic vitality firm in Cali.
He says he prefers Mr. Hernández to Mr. Petro, a longtime senator, exactly due to his lack of political expertise.
The query is whether or not Mr. Hernández will be capable of keep that outsider standing within the weeks main as much as the runoff, as key political figures align themselves to his marketing campaign.
Just minutes after he gained second place on Sunday, two highly effective right-wing senators, María Fernanda Cabal and Paloma Valencia, pledged their help for him, and Mr. Posada predicted that others have been prone to observe.
Mr. Uribe, who backed Mr. Hernández’s run for mayor in 2015, is an more and more polemic determine who turns off many Colombians. Mr. Posada predicted that he wouldn’t throw his weight behind Mr. Hernández, in order to not price him voters.
If Mr. Hernández can stroll that troublesome line — courting the institution’s votes with out tarnishing his picture — it might be troublesome for Mr. Petro to beat him.
Many political analysts consider that the roughly 8.5 million votes Mr. Petro obtained on Sunday is his ceiling, and that lots of Mr. Gutiérrez’s 5 million votes shall be added to the six million Mr. Hernández acquired.
As the outcomes grew to become clear, Mr. Hernández’s supporters rushed to his marketing campaign headquarters on one of many most important avenues in Bogotá, the capital.
Many wore shiny yellow marketing campaign T-shirts, hats and ponchos, which they mentioned they’d purchased themselves as an alternative of being handed out free by the marketing campaign, in line with Mr. Hernández’s cost-cutting ideas.
“I have never seen a person with characteristics like those of the engineer Rodolfo,” mentioned Liliana Vargas, a 39-year outdated lawyer, utilizing a typical nickname for Mr. Hernández, who’s a civil engineer. “He is a political being who is not a politician,” she mentioned. “It is the first time that I am totally excited to participate in a democratic election in my country.”
Nearby, Juan Sebastián Rodríguez, 39, a pacesetter of Mr. Hernández’s Bogotá marketing campaign, known as the candidate “a rock star.”
“He is a phenomenon,” he mentioned. “We are sure that we are going to win.”
Genevieve Glatsky contributed reporting from Bogotá.