Rodolfo Hernández, a 77-year-old engineer whose only political experience was having been mayor of Bucaramanga between 2016 and 2020, He will compete with Gustavo Petro, the candidate of the Historical Pact, for the Presidency of Colombia on June 19.
With a speech clearly marked by populism, lambasting “the corrupt” in each public outing -despite the fact that he himself has a case in the Prosecutor’s Office for alleged corruption in a garbage management contract in Bucaramanga, a case in which his son appears strongly entangled-, without attending many debates and appealing to a very effective strategy on social networks, the “engineer” managed to unseat Fico Gutiérrez from the second presidential round.
(Lea: Rodolfo Hernández confirms that he will meet with Fajardo next week)
He went from 77,238 votes in October 2015 (when he was elected mayor) to 5,953,209 this Sunday (28.15 percent of the total), 99.9 percent of the country’s polling stations were counted. He got 895,199 votes from Federico Gutiérrez, the man who until a little over a month ago appeared as the only candidate capable of challenging Petro for victory, and managed to stay with the second place this May 29.
Hernández will now be in the second electoral round against Petro, who this Sunday won 8,527,768 votes.
(Don’t stop reading: Abstention was 45% and is the lowest in 20 years in the first round)
What explains the phenomenon of Rodolfo Hernández in the 2022 presidential elections?
This Sunday’s elections showed that the majority of Colombians want a change of political direction. And, as a defeated Sergio Fajardo pointed out in the afternoon, both Gustavo Petro and Rodolfo Hernández represent a break with what many citizens identify as the establishment.
The former mayor of Bucaramanga sells himself as an executor, a technician who has solved his economic problems in life —which is why, he says, he is not thinking of getting rich at the expense of his position— and that he is not bound by bureaucratic forms to achieve the results that are needed. The image of him as a family man – his wife and his mother also appear sporadically at campaign events – has also permeated Colombians.
(Also read: Rodolfo Hernández, the engineer who went to the second presidential round)
Rodolfo Hernández prevailed in 12 departments of Colombia, especially in those in the center of the national territory (except Bogotá).
Guillermo Henao, a strategist and political analyst at the National University, pointed out that one of the keys to Hernández’s ascent lies in the break with the way of doing politics: “Digital politics beats traditional politics,” said the analyst. And he added that Federico Gutiérrez “could not remove the ballast of uribismo and also at all times had the mark of Duque“.
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Rodolfo Hernández, who has not held positions far from Uribismo, is instead considered a outsider of traditional politics. And this image has earned him, even in the younger layers of the population who have been buying Gustavo Petro’s speech for some years.
Let’s say that Rodolfo Hernández understood, in the same way that other candidates had understood in the past, that if debates are not his forte, it was not worth going…
Juan Sebastián Jiménez, an analyst at the National University, adds that it also worked for Hernández not to go to the debates, where his proposals -or the lack of them in several key fields- could be much more evident: “Let’s say that Rodolfo Hernández understood, in the same way that other candidates had understood in the past, that if the debates are not his forte, it was not worth going, and that his voters were not going to grow because of the debates in general.“.
(Lea: Gustavo Petro: “Corruption is not fought with phrases on TikTok”)
And he also points out that his campaign “was very good on social networks, very good at generating news”: “That made him achieve something that was his great deficit at the beginning of the campaign, which was the lack of national recognition, not so many people knew”
The analyst points out that “Rodolfo, as Trump did at the time, is a candidate who has known how to catapult himself through social networks and that is one of the keys to his success.”
(Also read: Rodolfo Hernández, confident in his victory in the second round)
For Jesús Agreda, professor at the Faculty of International Political and Urban Studies at the Universidad del Rosario, the Rodolfo phenomenon is due to the fact that he managed to lead the anti-corruption discourse.
“He has that strong speech around one of the most transcendental problems in Colombian politics, which is corruption. Also, people want a change and a less risky direction was Rodolfo. He filled that void,” he opined.
The political analyst Carlos Arias believes that the Rodolfo phenomenon is due to the boredom that Colombians have with continuity, to the phenomena of public opinion that today are confirmed and consolidated in digital networks since people, for the most part, they are fed up with the right. In addition, they warned that Federico had no chance of winning in the second round and Rodolfo collected the useful vote associated with Petro’s fear.
Until today, his campaign has spent 2,267 million pesos, most of it from personal resources, credits and contributions. And now, According to the same polls that predicted his passage to the second round, he has a clear chance of getting in the way of a Gustavo Petro who was even thinking of winning in the first round.
ELTIEMPO.COM