Rodolfo Hernández is Colombia's Trump and He May Be Headed for the Presidenti... - 0 views
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The Colombian establishment is lining up behind Rodolfo Hernández, a populist businessman with an incendiary streak, to defeat the leftist former rebel Gustavo Petro.
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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 against Federico Gutiérrez, a conservative establishment candidate who had argued that a vote for Mr. Petro amounted to “a leap into the void.’’
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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.
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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.
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“There are changes that are not changes,” Mr. Petro said at a campaign event on Sunday night, “they are suicides.”
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The story line was: left versus right, change versus continuity, the elite versus the rest of the country.
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Still, Colombia’s right-wing establishment has begun lining up behind him, bringing many of their votes with them, and making a win for Mr. Petro look like an uphill climb.
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“The Colombian right has reached such an extremely disastrous stage,” said Mr. Posada, “that they prefer a government that offers them nothing as long as it is not Petro.”
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At 77, Mr. Hernández built much of his support on TikTok, once slapped a city councilman on camera and recently told The Washington Post that he had a “messianic” effect on his supporters, who he compared to the “brainwashed” hijackers who destroyed the twin towers on 9/11.
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Until just a few days ago, Colombia’s political narrative seemed simple: For generations, politics had been dominated by a few wealthy families, and more recently, by a hard-line conservatism known as Uribismo, founded by the country’s powerful political kingmaker, former president Álvaro Uribe.
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But voter frustration with poverty, inequality and insecurity, which was exacerbated by the pandemic, along with a growing acceptance of the left following the country’s 2016 peace process with its largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, seemed to shift the dynamic.
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Mr. Hernández, who won 28 percent of the vote, has attracted a broad swath of voters eager for change who could never get on board with Mr. Petro.
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Mr. Hernández, with his fuzzy orange hair and businessman’s approach to politics, has also attracted voters who say they want someone with Trumpian ambition, and are not troubled if he is prone 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.)
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Two of the country’s biggest issues are poverty and lack of opportunity, and Mr. Hernández appeals to people who say he can help them escape both.
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“Political people steal shamelessly,” said Álvaro Mejía, 29, who runs a solar energy company in Cali.
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He says he prefers Mr. Hernández to Mr. Petro, a longtime senator, precisely because of his lack of political experience.
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If Mr. Hernández can walk that difficult line — courting the establishment’s votes without tarnishing his image — it could be difficult for Mr. Petro to beat him.
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As the results became clear, Mr. Hernández’s supporters rushed to his campaign headquarters on one of the main avenues in Bogotá, the capital.
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Many wore bright yellow campaign T-shirts, hats and ponchos, which they said they’d bought themselves instead of being handed out free by the campaign, in keeping with Mr. Hernández’s cost-cutting principles.