What a dreadful few years for politics. It has been impossible to escape the shrill idiocy of populism; the hard-line reactionary simplicity of the right, and the utopian virtue-signalling moral grandstanding of the left.
Yesterday’s presidential election in Colombia offered no respite.
Gustavo Petro, a demagogic polemicist, ex-guerrilla and victim-syndrome former mayor of Bogota won 8 million votes. While hard-line semi-nativist authoritarian Uribe won 10 million.
We’re set up for four years of a congress-controlling Duque Uribe presidency pitched against an increasingly messianic revolutionary. Lord, save us.
Any hope for a social democrat or for a centre-right, liberal (in the European sense), government has perished.
Colombians have got what they deserved?
Maybe they have, or maybe it’s the politicians’ fault. Who can blame Colombians for fearing Gustavo Petro with the penumbra of Venezuela?
Who can blame Colombians for fearing Uribe’s return? Memories are short, but the amnesia is not so great as to forget the false positives or the oppression of opposition, or the corruption, or the scandal of the health EPS.
Petro whipped up fear. Uribe whipped up fear.
Is it Colombians fault they fell for it? I’m not sure that it is, I am not sure that Colombians haven’t been offered stale bread and decadent circuses.
What to expect of President Duque now he is elected?
The 41 year old is a blank canvass. He has virtually no experience – just four years as a senator – and has spent much of his adult life focused on and or living in the USA.
Duque was once a Santista, then he was a Vargas Llerista. He’s an Uribista, but not of the ‘pura sangre’ kind. He comes across well enough on television. He’s cogent in his argument, has, it is claimed, a photographic memory, and he is charmingly enough devoted to his family, to football and to vallenato.
He is a youth-wash for Uribe and for Pastrana, and for Ordonez. An acceptable face in a gallery of – for many Colombians – rogues.
Like President Santos, he will control, with virtual unanimity, the Congress. But unlike Santos, he cannot call on favours from a family that run a major part of the Colombian media.
Big business will be happy enough, and the US will be pleased to have their number one ally in South America back at the table. Mr Santos had fallen out of favour in Washington, and there was a sense the Colombians were, following the huge spike in coca production, undoing all the good work of the Plan Colombia years.
What role will Uribe play? Will they run the government as a tandemocracy like Medvedev and Putin? Or will Uribe stick to foreign affairs, getting his former colleagues out of jail and plunging the punitive knife into the Farc?
What will Petro do? He can take up a seat in Congress (for the first time, the loser of the presidential run-off and his VP running mate are automatically given a seat in the Capitolio), and he can hog the airwaves with his admonishing rhetoric.
Will Petro run again in 2022? It’s almost impossible to foresee a scenario in which he doesn’t tilt for the top job again. He will spend the next 4 years campaigning.
Petro has proved to the left that he is their only viable candidate. They know he is one of them. He can afford to spend the next few years pretending to move towards the centre.
Striking fear into Colombians worked to get him into second place. To win next time, Petro needs to convince 10 per cent of the nation that he is not a rabid leftist. He must convert himself into a Trojan horse.
If you are alarmed by Duque’s victory, just wait until 2022 when Petro wins.