The presidential candidate of the Historical Pact, Gustavo Petro, maintains a significant advantage over his main rivals ahead of the elections on May 29, according to the survey carried out by the Latin American Strategic Center for Geopolitics (Celag). The survey revealed that the leftist candidate and former mayor of Bogotá maintains a 48 percent vote intention against Rodolfo Hernández of the Governors Anti-Corruption League which got a 21.8 percent of voting intention and is positioned in second place.
“The polls of this last week and the trend of this last month coincide in that Gustavo Petro is the first and the one preferred by Colombians, and with a very comfortable distance compared to the second”assured the director of Celag, Alfredo Serrano Mancilla, in dialogue with Page 12. This week the former mayor of Bucaramanga recorded a trend in his favor that left the right-wing candidate Federico “Fico” Gutiérrez of Team for Colombia in third place with 21.4 percent.
“The word change is not just a slogan”
The wide advantage of the candidate of the Historical Pact against the candidates of the center and of the right shows “the centrality of Petro and his political project and of the binomial with Francia Márquez”, analyzed Serrano Mancilla. The environmental defender and Afro-Colombian leader, winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2018, ranked third in the primary elections on March 13 and later joined the formula that today leads the polls in Colombia.
“Something interesting is that the word change that he (Petro) has been proposing is not just a slogan,” assured the Celag director in reference to Petro and Márquez’s campaign motto: Change for life. “Colombian society is changing and is in tune with what Petro and progressivism are proposing. A State that guarantees social rights, education, greater distribution of income, less injustice, more peace and life, all the surveys agree”observes Serrano Mancilla.
Uribe in decline
The Celag survey also accounts for the decline of candidates close to former right-wing president Álvaro Uribe as a political option for the May 29 elections. “The difference with respect to Uribismo, which is the other political identity, and that the polls also agree that it has remained a minority in the country,” Mancilla tells this newspaper. “It did not manage to grow and did not reach the value that it did have years ago”, he added. In another survey carried out by Celag in April 2022, a 82.8 percent of those surveyed have a negative image of the current Colombian president, Iván Duque. In that same survey, 41.3 percent indicated that Uribe should retire from politics, while 30 percent said that he should go to jail.
With the panorama that opens the survey, the centrist candidate is positioned in a very distant fourth place with just five points is an indication that in Colombia “the center does not exist”. “In other Latin American countries it does not exist either, but in Colombia the center proposals reflected by Sergio Fajardo, who is running for the third time, and who not only failed to win the first and second time he ran, but our survey places him in the last places in terms of voting intentions”, affirmed the director of Celag.
First electoral round
The progressive candidate referred to the Celag survey during the closing of the campaign and assured that the Historical Pact is about to win the presidency. “The CELAG survey puts us 400,000 votes away from winning in the first round. I think we should make that effort. It is achieved if the citizens take up my campaign and go out to convince the undecided, if the young people claim their identification cards at the registry office. Let’s shout 29M: Freedom, ”Petro wrote on his Twitter account.
For his part, Serrano Mancilla maintains that It is still unknown if Petro is going to win in the first round, although “we believe that he is not far from it”. In turn, he stated that another of the questions facing the next elections is about the growth of the intention to vote in favor of the candidate of the League of Anti-Corruption Governors. “He searches with a kind of language that provokes politics, although he comes from politics, sometimes with Trumpist outbursts, trying to get out of Uribe”stated to Page 12.
“That’s what all the polls say. Nor should we exaggerate, she is very far from Petro. What we do not know is whether the Uribe vote will gradually camouflage itself and opt for Rodolfo, that represents this anti-system third way, ultraliberal, in some things even similar to Milei and Bolsonaro”, observes the director of Celag. In this sense, he explained that Petro is not going to lose votes, but rather a transfer of votes between the second and third candidates (Gutiérrez and Hernández). In addition, he indicated that the votes of the centrist candidate “They are perhaps more Petrists than anti-Petrists.”
Background of fraud
The Celag survey also asked those surveyed if they believe that there will be fraud in their municipalities. “In Colombia, something called the machinery vote, which is the purchase of votes, is naturalized from the media, citizens, institutions, and the political class. They have an engineering of electoral fraud with a very sophisticated variety”, said Mancilla who was reminded how in the legislative it was shown that they took 400 thousand votes from Colombia Humana.
According to Serrano Mancilla, in Colombia and in the Latin American region there is an exhaustion of the neoliberal paradigm and a “crisis of expectations of neoliberalism.” This is reflected in the distance of Colombian society from the security proposals that have marked the last few years in the country. “In Colombia, society is truly tired of so much injustice and violence that has the conservative bloc represented by Uribism as its standard bearers”he claimed. “It is true that they do not want there to be insecurity in the streets, but that does not mean that they agree with it being militarized”, accurate. The director of Celag recalled a survey carried out in 2021 when the National Strike was carried out in Colombia. “Citizens were in favor of social protests, there was no negative stigmatization of them. Colombian society changed. It’s not a slogan.”Serrano Mancilla concluded.
Survey data
The survey had as its universe Colombians over 18 years of age and with a predisposition to vote in the next elections. 52 percent of the sample corresponds to women and 48 percent to men. Six geographic regions were established (Bogotá, Caribe, Centro, Antioquía, Pacífico and Orinoquía) and in those regions the 22 most populous departments were taken. From these departments, a sample of 45 localities of different sizes was selected, including department capitals, most populated cities and rural populations.
The sample size was 2,174 cases and the study presents a margin of error of +-0.9 percent and +-2.1 percent according to the distribution dispersion with a 95 percent confidence interval.