All of Colombia knows the cuisine of her home in Bucaramanga, in the northeast of Colombia. Because it is from the family table that Rodolfo Hernandez led a good part of his electoral campaign. And it is also there that, yellow polo shirt on the shoulders, the iconoclastic candidate delivered his brief victory speech (four minutes) after coming second in the first round of the presidential election, Sunday, May 29. “We now know the will of citizens to end corruption as a system of government, asserted the outsider live on Facebook. Today, the clans who believed in their eternal power have lost.”
Qualified for the second round under the beard of right-wing contender Federico Gutierrez (in third position), the 77-year-old independent candidate thwarted the odds. Credited with 19% of the vote one week before the elections, he finally won 28%. Here he is ready to play a bad trick again on June 19 to Gustavo Petro, the left-wing candidate who came out on top (40%), considered until then as the favorite. But, for the latter, the announced victory no longer seems so obvious, as the result of the “Colombian Trump” reshuffles the cards.
Like Trump, Rodolfo Hernandez multiplies provocations
A millionaire who made his fortune in the construction of social housing in the 1990s, Rodolfo Hernandez financed his campaign with his own money. Originally from Bucaramanga (600,000 souls) of which he was mayor from 2015 to 2019, “El Ingeniero” (the engineer), as he is called in Colombia, refuses any affiliation and has sworn to remove from power the traditional parties.
Left-wing Colombian presidential candidate Gustavo Petro votes in Bogota, May 29, 2022
afp.com/Juan BARRETO
“In the eyes of the electorate, he embodies the hard-working, frank and honest business leader, far from the degraded image of the political elites”, observes Paola Montilla, professor of political science at the Externado de Colombia University. The candidate’s advantage? He doesn’t have his tongue in his pocket. On TikTok and Facebook, his favorite channels of expression, he does not hesitate to treat his opponents as “scoundrels” or “thieves”. His colloquial, even coarse language, delights voters who are as mocking as they are disillusioned by the political class deemed to be corrupt.
“His message is well understood because it is expressed in a simple way”
Like the former American president, Rodolfo Hernandez multiplies the provocations. Interviewed by RCN radio in 2016, he said he was an admirer of Hitler… before correcting the situation six years later. Today, he assures that he had confused with Albert Einstein! In 2018, another coup: in full municipal council, the mayor slaps an elected official who accused him of corruption. More recently, on May 31, this assumed macho sparked the ire of feminists and the consternation of his opponents by affirming: “The ideal would be for women to devote themselves to raising children.” And if the candidate promises at length to fight against corruption, he himself was summoned to court for a case of public contracts awarded to members of his family, when he was mayor.
These escapades do not prevent “El Ingeniero” from gaining popularity. “His message is well understood by the electorate because he expresses himself in a simple, direct way, by filming himself with his telephone from his living room or his kitchen”, continues political scientist Paola Montilla, for whom “the success of this outsider confirms rejection of traditional parties”. But where to situate it in the political spectrum? Hard to say. Often classified between the center and the right, he promises to abolish certain taxes, but also to legalize marijuana and, as a good populist, to give up his salary as president.
The left, she is worried about the postponement of votes in the second round. “I would have preferred Gustavo Petro to confront Gutierrez, loose, just after the results, a pro-Petro activist he met at his candidate’s election night, at the Tequendama hotel in Bogota. Gutierrez voters hate Petro and they will vote Rodolfo to prevent the left from winning,” he fears. In fact, the right-wing candidate has already asked his supporters to join the troublemaker candidate. Together, the two weigh 52%. This is enough to upset the left which, for the first time in Colombian history, is about to take over the presidency.