One lesson of this first round is that most Colombians prefer anything— literally anything —than continuity. Federico Gutiérrez, the candidate of the government, the clans and the heaviest “machinery”, was therefore punished mercilessly. As Sergio Fajardo never knew how to embody the spirit of change, his failure was resounding and, of course, deserved. Gustavo Petro and Rodolfo Hernández remained. Both, in their own way, are the change. After the elections, and in view of the difficult scenario for the second round of Petrism, many now want to see in “Rodolfo” the plan C of Uribismo and a simple scenario, again, of left against right. I think they are wrong. Let me explain.
Hernández can now receive the support of Uribismo. Already, in fact, he received the blessing of Paloma Valencia and María Fernanda Cabal. Undeniably the uribismo will play for “Rodolfo”. That does not mean, however, that Hernández is, from the beginning, an underground Uribe token. It lacks much more organic links to those networks and their resources.
The Uribe government mobilized, with full brazenness, in favor of Fico, and never of Hernández. In his language of great statesman, the latter referred to Iván Duque, in addition, among other weighted pronouncements, as “that hijue… that has us ruined.” Their votes are, in large part, against the corruption of a Uribe government. The token of continuity was the mediocre Fico and already left the board. The message of “Rodolfo”, sincere or not, has a lot of “anti-establishment” and, due to its regional origin, “anti-centralism” and “anti-elitism”. That’s why he got where he did.
That now, in the second round scenario, Hernández must become friends with the enemies of his adversary is not enough to brand him as having already been what he will probably become in the immediate future. The good news of this May 29, with abstraction of the new chapters of this history, is that the uribismo, and the whole establishment suffered a fulminating electoral defeat.
The 14 and a half million votes of Petro and Rodolfo are votes against a hegemonic project and a way of doing politics extremely worn. The majorities are fed up with the Uribe right and the “machinery”. Put simply: it’s one thing how “Rodolfo” must tacitly align himself with what he claimed to hate in order to win, and another thing is why it is he, and not alias Fico, who became Petro’s contender. Hernández, for the voters, does represent a change in the face of the project of the Uribe right.
Now, since “change” is a neutral term with multiple possible directions, the question is what it may mean for Hernandez’s followers and how to describe this quaint character on the ideological spectrum. Some conceptual distinctions are relevant here.
In his hackneyed book on the right and the left, Norberto Bobbio introduces a useful distinction between two types of center: the center as “third included” and as “third inclusive.” The first is represented by fajardismo with its “neither for the one nor for the other”. Here the center is defined as “third” by its equidistance from the extremes or its “lukewarmness”. The second is the center as a “synthesis” of them with their “both one and the other”.
Hernandez, from my perspective, embodies the latter type. “Rodolfo” represents, on the one hand, the patriarchal and authoritarian country, and, on the other hand, the anti-corruption, propriety and anti-pneum country that, with the help of a cunning businessman, now tries to catch up on its social debt. It is not a question here of exploiting neutrality, but of integrating the extremes. The task is carried out by an old “fox”, curmudgeonly, vulgar, populachero and – by Colombian criteria – “bonachón”.
If one reviews, for example, the history and ideologues of the conservative revolution in pre-Hitler Germany, one finds that these were not, without more, right-wing movements. The “red-brown” positions and the idea of “national-Bolshevism”, represented by authors such as Moeller van den Bruck, Ernst Niekisch or Karl Otto Paetel, undoubtedly aimed at crushing communism from an authoritarian and nationalist perspective, but, at the same time, they welcomed popular mobilization and, above all, its demands for social justice.
The official name of Nazism, namely “National Socialism”, reveals this hybridization between right and left within the anti-elitist cult of the “people”. “Das deutsche Volk…”, Hitler roared repeatedly. It was, again, the center as “third superior” or “inclusive”. I am not arguing with this something as crazy as that Rodolfo Hernández is a Nazi, but his position, unlike the dichotomous world of a certain Petrism, is not without more right-wing.
Perhaps when Hernández claimed to be a “follower” of the “great German thinker Adolf Hitler” (he later apologized with the strange excuse that he was thinking of Einstein), he was unconsciously revealing his vague intention to amalgamate, in a Colombian key, the virtues of the left and the right.
Back to the point: change, in terms of “Rodolfo,” is the integration of the authoritarian-patriarchal mentality with elements of a progressive and (discursively) anti-elitist agenda via “managerial skill.” It sounds weird, but it’s not implausible. It sounds unlikely, but the improbable is also real. Ideological coherence is not an important criterion for effective collective desires. The important thing, in this context, is to condense desires.
Petro, however, only represents for the electorate the progressive agenda: rights of ethnic and sexual minorities, listening to peasant struggles, fighting the extractivist economic model, sympathy with the student movement and the slum youth killed in the first half of 2021, etc.
Many Colombians, however, want a new paterfamilias, one just as rabid, but purified, without serious guilt, and, at the same time, a leader with social sensitivity and capable of beating, also with rage, the “establishment”. That’s “Rodolfo.” Here the change has a part of novelty and a part of “restoration”, with its updated repetition of the original.
Defeating Hernández means, for Petro, detracting from the credibility of the left side of his integrative centrism and exploiting to the maximum the incoherence between an anti-corruption discourse and the de facto support of blocks of corrupt politicians, but Petro loses, in any case, in a cultural terrain that is difficult to modify and extended: that of our representations, still predominant, of “authority”.
Politics, however, is a matter of tactics and strategy. Nothing is sung. Petro has three weeks left to better market its exchange option and make timely alliances. Time is of the essence.
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The content expressed in this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of El Mostrador.
