2022 Colombian Election Digest III
The Colombian congressional elections and three presidential primaries are now less than a week away! The third edition of my weekly digest…
The Colombian congressional elections and three presidential primaries are now less than a week away! The third edition of my weekly digest brings the latest news from the campaign trail. If you haven’t already, you can read the first and second editions.
Duque’s vote in the primaries and Zuluaga’s solitude
On March 3, in an interview on Blu Radio, President Iván Duque said that he’d vote in the primaries on March 13. The problem is: his party’s candidate (Óscar Iván Zuluaga) is not participating in any primary, and the Centro Democrático (CD)’s order had been not to support any of the primaries and only the party’s congressional candidates, although Álvaro Uribe was more ambiguous recently when he admitted that some supporters would vote in the primaries while others would not.
On Blu Radio, Duque complained that his party wanted to put him a straightjacket and said that he’d vote in the primaries because he believes in primaries as a valuable democratic mechanism (he was, after all, chosen in a successful primary in 2018 which greatly boosted his campaign’s momentum).
Duque didn’t say which primary he’d vote for but it’s obvious: he will vote in the Equipo por Colombia’s primary. Who will he vote for? In the past he’s praised all of the members of this coalition, but he will most likely vote for Fico Gutiérrez (he could possibly vote for Peñalosa too). In a recent interview, CD senator María Fernanda Cabal (the uribista far-right darling, who openly dislikes Duque) said that Fico is Duque’s candidate and that Duque only used Zuluaga last year to defeat her (she also said that she fears Fico will be a Duque 2.0). Fico has been widely seen for months as a crypto-uribista or as uribismo’s Plan B: although Fico is not an uribista, he talks like one and has many close (and longstanding) connections with uribismo.
All of this is not too surprising: Duque’s main interest in these elections is stopping Petro, and it is unlikely that Duque has any great affection, sympathy or sense of loyalty for Zuluaga. Duque and his small group of loyalists (like retiring senator Ernesto Macías) worked very hard to have Zuluaga participate in the right-wing primary and Duque was very unhappy when Uribe and others preemptively announced that Zuluaga wouldn’t participate in that primary. As Caracol Radio reported at the time, Duque had a very tense phone call with Zuluaga afterwards in which Duque curtly ended the conversation by telling him “don’t count on me” before hanging up.
But in doing this, Duque is helping to self-sabotage if not bury Zuluaga’s candidacy. He will be voting in a primary for candidate other than his own party’s candidate, knowing full well that a successful primary will benefit the winner of that primary. Of course, Duque isn’t the only uribista who will be voting in a primary on March 13. Other uribistas have already said that they want to vote in the primaries. Cabal, for example, has been critical of the fact that her party was telling its people not to participate in the primaries.
With basically two weeks until the candidate registration/modification period closes and just a week before the primaries, it’s clear that Zuluaga’s campaign is struggling and not taking off — and that the tea leaves aren’t promising for him. It is becoming more and more obvious that uribismo will consider Plan B and that there will be frenetic negotiations between March 13 and March 18 (after which candidacies can no longer be modified) between the CD and the winner of the Equipo por Colombia primary.
La Silla Vacía recently reported how uribista bases in at least 7 departments are covertly campaigning for Fico. For legal reasons, uribista politicians can’t openly campaign for Fico, but their networks are working for him, and Fico’s campaign has an intermediary who helps to arrange uribista politicians’ support for Fico’s campaign. In the regions, some of the uribista candidates who are supporting Fico include senator Paola Holguín’s group Los Paolos in Antioquia, Ernesto Macías’ allies in Huila and CD congressional candidate Johanna González in Santander (González is the wife of former congressman Edwin Ballesteros, who resigned his seat in 2021 so that the Supreme Court could not investigate him in a corruption case). Paola Holguín, who leads one of the main uribista factions in the party’s cradle and ultimate stronghold, Antioquia, has been a close friend and ally of Fico Gutiérrez for several years.
Factions close to Duque and the government are also supporting Fico. After Duque announced he’d vote in the primaries, CD senatorial candidate Edward Rodríguez, who is a very close ally of Duque, went even further and said he’d vote for Fico in the primary (although he says this is to “arrive united behind Zuluaga in the first round to stop Petro”). The father of the private secretary of Duque’s chief of staff has been openly supporting Fico and helped him collect signatures to secure ballot access last year. In the Valle del Cauca, the political group of former senator Susana Correa, the current director of the Social Prosperity Department (DPS, the agency which manages several benefits programs), is campaigning for Fico.
On March 5, Ernesto Macías added fuel to the fire when he told Blu Radio that, regarding Zuluaga’s candidacy, “we cannot say what will happen because his campaign will begin after the primaries” and that the party is not thinking about him but about the country. Macías wants to form an alliance with the winner of the right-wing primary.
Zuluaga has not publicly commented on these happenings, but is certainly upset about the way he’s being treated. He might not have his word to say in the end, but for now it seems as if he won’t go down without a fight. He’s recently intensified his criticisms of the government, tweeting that the government has lacked character in dealing with criminals.
Zuluaga is increasingly abandoned by his own party. It is looking likelier that his candidacy will not make it to the first round, and that uribismo will try to unite behind Fico (if he wins the primary) after March 13. The law makes it quite hard for the winner of a primary to drop out — if he/she were to do so, he/she would need to reimburse the costs of organizing the primary. This was one of the reasons why Humberto de la Calle did not drop out in 2018 despite his very bad polling numbers. Therefore, if someone is going to drop out before March 18, it’s certainly going to be Zuluaga…
Running mate season
Candidates not participating in a primary have until March 11 to file their candidacies, and then until March 18 to make modifications to their registration. Candidates who will win the primaries on March 13 have until March 18 to file their candidacies. This means that it’s running mate season!
Unlike in the United States, choosing a running mate doesn’t get as much attention and the vice presidency has not (yet) been a stepping stone to the presidency (Vargas Lleras tried to make it a stepping stone, but failed in 2018). However, like in the US, candidates will consider different factors in selecting their running mates. In 2018, for example, Duque, Petro and Fajardo all picked women as their running mates, and Duque chose the runner-up in the right-wing primary, Marta Lucía Ramírez.
As there is still time for candidacies to be modified until March 18, it is possible that some of the newly announced running mates are just placeholders until after the elections on March 13, when candidates may reevaluate their tickets. In 2018, Germán Vargas Lleras initially picked Luis Felipe Henao as a placeholder running mate and later replaced him with Juan Carlos Pinzón.
Rodolfo Hernández already had one failed attempt at finding a running mate a few weeks ago: as I recounted in my first digest, Paola Ochoa, a journalist, withdrew just four days after she was announced. Her name generated quite a bit of controversy and blowback. Hernández’s new running mate is far less controversial, but also largely unknown to the public: Marelen Castillo, an educator who is currently director of strategic initiatives for the Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios (Uniminuto), a private Catholic university. She has a doctorate in education from Nova Southeastern University in Florida and is a researcher in virtual and distance learning. Hernández had been looking for a woman to be his running mate. At the surface, she adds little to his candidacy, although she may balance his caprices and impulsiveness.
Óscar Iván Zuluaga selected Alicia Eugenia Silva as his running mate. Silva, an economist, was secretary of government in Antanas Mockus’ first administration in Bogotá in the 1990s and his private secretary in his second administration in the early 2000s. She has no electoral experience and she supported Duque in 2018. Zuluaga presented her as someone who will help him lead the ‘education revolution’ that is one of his main issues. But it remains to be seen whether Zuluaga will even make it to the first round…
The conservative National Salvation Movement (MSN)’s presidential candidate, Enrique Gómez Martínez, announced that Carlos Cuartas, a businessman from Antioquia, will be his running mate. Cuartas is in fifth place on the MSN’s closed list for the Senate.
Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá who is running the Equipo por Colombia primary endorsed by the Partido de la U, has announced that, if he wins, his running mate will be Dilian Francisca Toro, the leader of the Partido de la U and former governor of the Valle del Cauca (2016–2019). Toro is the ‘electoral baroness’ of the Valle and leads one of the most powerful political groups in Colombia with control of the governorship for two terms and five members of Congress in 2018. Toro gave him the endorsement of the Partido de la U after Peñalosa failed to collect enough signatures, and since then she’s become an important part of his campaign, which will rely on her machine in the Valle to get out the vote on March 13. They’ve held mass events together in her stronghold and he’s admitted that she has advised him on how to say things given his tendency to make bizarre, arrogant or politically incorrect/insensitive statements.
New polls
There were two new polls this week: one from Invamer, one from Guarumo. Both of them show that Petro remains in a strong, if not very strong, position to win and that the Pacto will likely be the top primary on March 13. I don’t believe it’s all that wise to overanalyze polls at this point (before March 13).
Invamer’s poll showed that 51% will ‘definitely’ vote in the primaries and another 20% will probably vote. Of those who will definitely or probably vote, 38% would vote in the Pacto Histórico’s primary, 19% in the Equipo por Colombia’s primary, 14.5% in the Centro Esperanza primary while 28.4% are unsure.
Petro would win the Pacto’s primary with 78.6% and Francia Márquez would be second with 13.5%. Fico Gutiérrez would win the right-wing primary with 29% against 25% for Alex Char, 18.7% for Enrique Peñalosa and 15.5% for David Barguil. Sergio Fajardo, finally, would win the centrist primary with 37.8% against 23.9% for Juan Manuel Galán, 14.9% for Carlos Amaya and 12.9% for Alejandro Gaviria. By the number of undecideds and the margin of error, the centrist primary is the one with the most uncertainty.
Invamer’s poll tested a large number of first and second round matchups. These are somewhat more useful than the frankly pointless polls asking for all current candidates, including those competing in primaries. In all scenarios, Petro is ahead in the first round with about 44–45% (excluding undecideds) and victorious in all runoff matchups with between 56% and 63% of valid votes. Fajardo and Fico would be his strongest opponents from the centrist and right-wing primaries, although Rodolfo Hernández remains in second place in all but two of the scenarios tested. All this is, of course, a snapshot in time that will definitely change.
These numbers, impressive as they may appear for Petro, are, in fact, quite similar to Invamer’s last poll, from November 2021. He remains the favourite, in large part because of the weakness of all his opponents (and their divisions). None of his opponents have yet managed to emerge from the pack — even Rodolfo Hernández has stagnated, at a not insignificant level (13–16%) of support. Will the primaries and/or the congressional elections allow for one of the other candidates to finally stand out?
Gustavo Petro remains a divisive figure: Invamer’s poll shows that about 43% have a favourable opinion of him, while 40% have an unfavourable opinion of him. That makes him the candidate with both the highest percentage of favourable views and the candidate with the highest percentage of unfavourable views.
The Guarumo-Ecoanalítica poll for El Tiempo also found that Petro, Fico and Fajardo lead their respective primaries and that the Pacto primary would attract the most voters. Of those who would participate in the primaries, 38% would vote in the Pacto primary, 37.5% in the right-wing primary and 24% in the centrist primary (a much smaller gap between the Pacto and the right than the Invamer poll). Petro would win the Pacto’s primary with over 81% support, while Fico would defeat Char by about 4% (33% to 29%) and Fajardo would defeat Galán by over 15% (37.5% to 22%).
The Guarumo poll also asked about voting intentions for the Senate and found the Conservatives and Liberals tied, with 15.3% and 14.2% respectively, followed by the CD (12.2%), CR (11.2%), the Pacto (10.8%), La U (6.5%), the Greens-Centro Esperanza (6.5%), MIRA-CJL (3.6%) and Nuevo Liberalismo (2.1%) with 7.2% of blank votes and 9% undecided. Congressional elections are very difficult to poll accurately so these numbers should be taken with a truckload of salt.
Other news
President Iván Duque will finally get a bilateral meeting with President Joe Biden in Washington, on March 10. Duque had been seeking out a one-on-one meeting with Biden since Biden’s inauguration over a year ago, and only managed to talk to him for 15 minutes on the sidelines of the COP26 summit in Glasgow last November. Biden clearly froze out Duque in payback for the Colombian government’s thinly-veiled support for Donald Trump in 2020. Several uribista congressmen openly supported Trump, including Juan David Vélez, the CD representative for Colombian expats, who lives in Florida and also has US citizenship. Vélez and Álvaro Uribe also endorsed GOP candidate María Elvira Salazar, who defeated a Democratic incumbent in FL-27 in 2020. In October 2020, Trump congratulated Uribe on his release from house arrest and called him a hero and he adopted the language of the Colombian right: he tweeted that Biden was a “puppet of castro-chavistas” and that he was supported by Gustavo Petro, “a major LOSER and and former M-19 guerrilla leader”. The accusation of castrochavismo against the left is an old favourite of uribismo in Colombia, particularly in 2016 and 2018. That rhetoric likely helped Trump and the GOP in South Florida in 2020, as Colombian-Americans are seen as a growing conservative bloc in Florida (the few Colombian citizens who do vote in Colombian elections from the US and Florida are overwhelmingly right-wing). The government and the CD were criticized both in Colombia and in the United States for their apparent preference for Trump. The US embassy in Bogotá urged all Colombian politicians to avoid getting involved in the US election, and Democrats complained of Colombian interference in US politics (some might say that the US only got a taste of its own medicine…). Former President Juan Manuel Santos criticized Duque for interfering in the US election. Colombian governments have traditionally prided themselves on their strong “bipartisan relationships” with all US administrations, but uribismo’s Trumpian sympathies in 2020 clearly damaged the US-Colombian bilateral relation since 2021. Biden is clearly not risking all that much by meeting with a lame-duck president who has only a few months left to his term.
Germán Vargas Lleras caused a lot of late-night speculation on Sunday, March 6 after his party, Cambio Radical (CR), put out an ‘emotional’ campaign ad waxing lyrical about Vargas Lleras’ long political career. The ad fueled manic speculation that Vargas Lleras, who did very poorly in the 2018 election despite his ‘strengths’ and political experience, was on the verge of announcing his presidential candidacy. Vargas Lleras needed to go on Blu Radio this morning to deny that he was running. In February, Vargas Lleras had already shut down speculation that he was going to run after his ally, and CR’s top candidate for Senate, David Luna expressed his hope that he’d run and said that he was convinced he’d do so. Vargas Lleras, not particularly known for his pleasant personality, harshly reprimanded Luna for his comments.
Liberal senator Mario Castaño, who is seeking reelection, is involved a corruption scandal. Castaño, a Liberal senator from Caldas, is accused of leading a corruption network which embezzled money from public contracts, including contracts with the national government, in four departments and of pocketing least 60 billion pesos in bribes (10% of the contracts’ value). This is a very similar modus operandi to the ‘marmalade’ (pork-barrel spending) during the Santos administration. Nine people were arrested, including members of Castaño’s inner circle. In a recording revealed by Semana, Castaño and his adviser boast about obtaining a contract in Chocó that will generate revenues of 15 billion pesos in 15 years. Castaño told La W radio that he was drunk when he talked about winning these contracts, and that he believes this is persecution by people using justice for evil purposes. Castaño was elected to the Senate in 2018 with about 73,000 votes, 48,000 of them in Caldas.
More endorsements for the candidates. Antanas Mockus endorsed Sergio Fajardo in a video where they talk about the importance of education. Fajardo was Mockus’ running mate in 2010, during the ‘green wave’. For Congress, Mockus has endorsed Viviana Barberena (Senate) and Jorge Torres (House-Bogotá). Former vice president (1998–2002) Gustavo Bell also endorsed Fajardo. Viviane Morales, former Liberal senator and former ambassador to France (2018–2021), endorsed David Barguil (Conservative). Viviane Morales is a prominent social conservative leader who, as senator, unsuccessfully led a controversial referendum to ban same-sex adoption. She endorsed Duque in 2018 after dropping out of the race herself. Barguil said that she would lead the referendum to overturn the Constitutional Court’s recent ruling decriminalizing abortion.
Controversy in the Pacto Histórico: During a campaign event in Medellín, senatorial candidate Álex Flórez was seen pushing/elbowing Susana Boreal, candidate for the House in Antioquia, because he wanted to be next to Petro and felt that she was taking his place. Amidst accusations of misogyny and machismo, Flórez initially refused to comment on ‘gossip’ but later apologized. Boreal said that the video spoke for itself and added that many candidates were uncomfortable with Flórez’s machista behaviour and left the stage. Supporters of the Pacto have asked him to resign. Susana Boreal is a young musician who, as conductor of the Medellín symphonic orchestra, supported last year’s protests, and is now second on the Pacto’s closed list for the House in Antioquia. Florez is a former Medellín city councillor (removed from office in 2021) who is very close to Medellín mayor Daniel Quintero, whose movement supports Petro. He is eleventh on the Pacto’s closed list for the Senate.
Once again, thank you for reading this week’s digest! Please expect a final pre-election digest on Friday or Saturday, to set expectations for Sunday!
