Colombia reaches the elections with the mirror of 2022 in front | Colombian Presidential Elections

Iván Cepeda on the left, Abelardo de la Espriella on the far right, Paloma Valencia on the established right. Three candidates focus attention for the first round of the Colombian presidential elections this Sunday, a reflection almost identical to that of the votes four years ago, when Gustavo Petro, Rodolfo Hernandez and Federico Gutiérrez represented very similar sectors and were the protagonists of the campaign. The actors have changed, but the geometry is the same: a consolidated left faces a right divided in two.

What is not written is that the 2022 script will be repeated. On that occasion, Gutiérrez was in second place in the polls when there was a week left to go to the polls and the ban arrived. Hernández had been growing while the current mayor of Medellín seemed stagnant. That trend continued: Hernández achieved the overtaking and went to the second round.

This time the candidate of the traditional right never took second place above the outsider. The surveys from the previous weekend, the last before the legal ban, showed a more or less uniform picture. Cepeda, left-wing senator and continuity candidate, has around 40% voting intention and is a leader, as he has been since he won the endorsement of his party in a popular consultation held last October. The ultra From Espriellawhich has occupied second place since the beginning of the year, exceeds 30%, while Valencia, which emerged strongly after its victory in the right-wing consultation in March, shows a decline and is around 18%.

Four years ago, Gutiérrez was above Hernández in those last measurements, but the growth trend in favor of the Bucaramanga native was clear. As on that occasion, in this position outsider From the right it seems to be the one that gives the most returns. Hernández, former mayor of Bucaramanga, the fifth largest city in the country, had a speech of permanent criticism of the political class. De la Espriella replicates that scheme with his division between “the usual ones” and “the never ones.” Gutiérrez, former mayor of Medellín Close to former president Álvaro Uribe, but always independent, he had received the support of a good part of the traditional center-right and right-wing parties. Now the one who does it is Valencia, who is also a loyal and proud member of Uribe’s party, until now the main leader of the Colombian right.

The definition of what happens this Sunday largely depends on the emotions of the electorate and what each sector understands as the country’s main problem. Cepeda is betting on the illusion of those who want to continue a left-wing government, and on the fear—of them and perhaps of others—before the return of Uribe, the most powerful politician of the first two decades of the century in Colombia and head of the right up to this moment. De la Espriella bets on fear of the deepening of the leftist project that would bring Colombia closer to what happened with Chavismo in neighboring Venezuela, and also on the emotion of those who have an anti-political and anti-state vision in general. Valencia, meanwhile, has proposed as a message the ability to combine different positions, to reconcile positions and to reach agreements, while pointing out that the country’s main problem in these elections is the possibility of deepening a leap towards either of the extremes, with the uncertainties that this brings.

In this last week, the candidates have held private meetings, attended interviews and, essentially, hammered away at those same ideas, with only one relevant strategic change: Valencia has gone on the offensive against the ultrawhom he has singled out for “hugging with bandits” and has said that he represents a leap into the void in equal measure to Cepeda. But everything has advanced without polls, without presidential debates at any time during the campaign and without in-depth reviews of what each of them implies in power.

That is why it is not yet clear whether the rest of the 2022 script will be repeated: the right adds more votes than the left in the first round, but its candidate outsider he seems to slow down his campaign, disappears for a good part of the three weeks until the runoff and, finally, receives fewer votes than the sum of his own and those of the traditional right in the first round. Meanwhile, the left grows, increases its support by 30% and wins the Presidency.

But even if this time it is Cepeda and De la Espriella who go to the second round with the left occupying first place, as the polls indicate, the script would change the protagonists: on one side there would not be a septuagenarian candidate and on the other there would not be a politician with an incendiary verb. What follows the scenario painted by the polls for this Sunday remains a mystery, and even more so when their data reflects a technical tie between those who reach the runoff.