On May 29, 2022, millions of Colombians voted for change. Since 1998, the country’s broadly right-leaning governments have all been heirs to an old political establishment. Two of its past four presidents — Andrés Pastrana and Juan Manuel Santos, directly descended from earlier heads of state. The others, Álvaro Uribe and current president Iván Duque, received support from the Liberal and Conservative Parties, both of which predate the American Republican Party and remained Colombia’s most dominant until the early 2000s. While Colombian democracy has seen vitriol and polarization, its political institutions and the elites entrusted with them had long spared it from some of the worst excesses of Latin American politics. In the late twentieth century, Colombia could boast uninterrupted democratic rule since 1958, a record surpassed in Latin America only by Costa Rica. In the early twenty-first, Colombia remained one of the only major democracies in the region to not elect a left-wing president between 1998 and 2011, at a time when most Latin American leaders were aligned with Hugo Chávez, the architect of Venezuela’s current dictatorship.
Yet, after a period of social unrest and rising poverty, largely sparked by the economic and humanitarian shock of the COVID-19 Pandemic, many Colombians lost faith in their institutions. Disapproval of the Supreme Court, the Congress, the President, and the country’s political parties all rose above 60% by February, 2022, leaving the Catholic Church and the Armed Forces as the only major institutions with net positive approval ratings. A few months later, a combined 69% of Colombian voters elected two populists — Gustavo Petro and Rodolfo Hernández — to compete for the presidency in the second round of voting this June. Both men are populists in their basic appeal, claiming to represent the masses against an elite that has failed them. However, they embody drastically different styles of populism, and a careful understanding of both reveals Petro’s to be more unfettered and dangerous.
Petro’s political life dates back to the late 1970s, when he joined the nationalist and ambiguously socialist M-19 terrorist organization. M-19 was responsible for seizing Colombia’s Palace of Justice in 1985, a deeply traumatic episode for the nation which caused the deaths of 100 innocent people, including half of the country’s sitting Supreme Court judges. While M-19 was demobilized and its members pardoned in 1990, Petro has not atoned for his role in it. As recently as 2018, he proudly tweeted an image of the M-19 banner on a mast at one of his rallies, claiming that there was “nothing to fear in Colombia’s best ideas.” He has praised left-wing authoritarians from neighboring countries just as unapologetically, referring to Hugo Chávez as “a great Latin American leader” in 2013 and exalting Fidel Castro as a second Simón Bolívar in 2016.
His characterization of Colombia’s legitimate institutions — political and otherwise — have been far less generous. At various points in this past presidential race, he has threatened to curtail the independence of Colombia’s central bank, called for landlords’ assets to be expropriated as punishment for any evictions, and denied the efficacy of COVID vaccines in order to disrupt the government’s measures against the Pandemic. Last August, he referred to a Jewish journalist who disagreed with him as a “neo-nazi,” a baseless smear reminiscent of Vladimir Putin’s recent remarks on the Ukrainian government. More broadly, he has repeatedly claimed that Colombia’s political regime is no better than that of neighboring Venezuela, echoing the Trumpian dictum of “Do you think our country’s so innocent?” when comparing the United States to Putin’s Russia.
This attack on every established institution — from private property and the healthcare system to democracy and the press — aims to fuel demand for a truly totalizing change. As his former center-left opponent Sergio Fajardo said in a debate, just a handful of Petro’s proposals would cost around $35 billion U.S. dollars, about $17 billion of which Petro’s current tax proposals do not account for. These figures are especially striking for a country with an annual government budget of about $93 billion dollars. It is unclear how Petro can make up the difference without infringing on the property rights of pensioners or other large segments of the population. In light of his aforementioned endorsements and affiliations, his commitment to democracy is similarly dubious.
Rodolfo Hernandez, by contrast, embraces a narrowly focused style of populism. While his background in business and acerbic personality have prompted some to describe him as a “Colombian Trump,” his political identity is far more ambiguous. His vice-presidential nominee, Marelen Castillo, would, if elected, become the first Afro-Colombian woman to hold the office. Unlike right-wing populists elsewhere in the Americas, Hernandez explicitly supports Colombia’s commitment to environmental agreements, such as COP26 and the regional Escazú Agreement. Unlike those in Europe, who have vilified migrants as threats to their countries of origin, Hernandez asserts that Colombia has a “historic debt” to its nearly 2 million Venezuelan migrants because Venezuela has been a large recipient of Colombian refugees in the past, and supports expanding the humanitarian and sanitary assistance available to them.
Hernandez has directed his vitriol almost exclusively against political corruption, a critical issue that has directly affected 15 million Colombians and caused the loss of about $4 billion dollars in Colombia between 2016 and 2020 alone, according to Transparency International. For that reason, he refused to form any political coalitions before the presidential elections, claiming that his “only alliance is with the Colombian people.” On the night of his success in the first round of voting, he claimed that “the country of politicking and corruption has lost.” This style of populism is disruptive in its condemnation of old practices, rejecting the idea that presidential candidates should promote political unity by compromising their platforms to gain support from a broad range of parties. Yet, it is also clear and specific in its target, unlike Petro’s broad rejection of Colombia’s institutions. While Hernández leaves room for others to disagree with him in good faith as long as they do not fall prey to “politicking and corruption,” Petro holds every political opponent and institutional barrier to his political plans in utter contempt, for if everything is wrong and only Petro can fix it, than everyone in Petro’s way is an enemy of the people. As such, Hernández is by far the least dangerous of the two options.
This does not absolve Hernández from his considerable flaws. He is notoriously gaffe-prone, having once mistaken Albert Einstein for Adolf Hitler in a live interview. While neither Petro nor Hernández would likely hold a congressional majority if elected, both candidates have publicly expressed their desire to circumvent Congress by declaring a state of emergency, eroding democratic accountability. In either case, Colombians should remain vigilant. Yet, the key difference between the men is that while Hernández may erode accountability for the sake of “draining the swamp,” Petro’s vision for Colombia promotes institutional damage as an end in itself. More broadly, as populism has grown increasingly relevant in this time of global crisis and discontent, it is crucial to distinguish between its many varieties, especially when, as is the case now in Colombia, voters are left with no real choice but to elect one kind or another.