What Abelardo de la Espriella’s Win With Less Than 1% Margin Means For Colombians & Investors

Colombia did something unprecedented last night. By a hair-thin margin, it elected a political outsider with no political party of his own, a man who came from completely outside the traditional political power bases. No doubt Abelardo de la Espriella had support; powerful figures and moneyed interests were behind him, but that is not a criticism or a conspiracy theory. The business community, from small shopkeepers to tycoons, has been fed up with the last four years of improvisation and worsening security.

Barring any post-election drama, President-elect de la Espriella will take over a very divided country, and if he is smart, he will understand that he was the first choice of only a minority of the electorate. He will have a choice. He can govern for the small hard core, or he can be a conciliator.

Colombia has a nasty history of political violence, going back to the country’s founding. The person most Colombians see as the founder of the nation, Colombia’s George Washington figure, Simón Bolívar, barely escaped with his life during what was known as the Septembrine Conspiracy, which was born out of a conflict in visions for the new country. For most of the country’s history, the hostility between the Conservatives and the Liberals, the two primary political parties for most of Colombia’s history, manifested itself with bullets every bit as much as with ballots. Even though Colombia has, for almost all of its history, been a real democracy; the country has had only one military strongman dictator, and even he tried to be something of a reformer; violence has always had a hand in politics.

“With less than half the vote, the only mandate he holds is for an inclusive, conciliatory approach.” — Loren Moss, Finance Colombia

I once was at a talk in Medellín, years ago, where the businessman Chris Daes was asked, “When will Colombia advance?” “When we learn to stop hating each other,” he said.

Last night, after the election results were announced, police stations in Kennedy and Bosa, low-income neighborhoods in the southwest of Bogotá, were attacked. Why? The police hadn’t done anything. Riot police were called out to Puerto Rellena in Cali after roads were blocked by Cepeda supporters. In Medellín, some supporters of the president-elect turned up with bats and clubs outside Plaza Mayor, one of the city’s main public squares, probably supporters of de la Espriella, and let me emphasize that this is my guess, but no violence was reported.

Outgoing President Gustavo Petro called for calm, but also complained about US President Donald Trump’s open support of de la Espriella, forgetting that just months ago he was in the US and called for the US military to turn against its own government. Petro and the losing candidate, Senator Iván Cepeda, have said that while they acknowledge the preliminary vote count, they will not concede until an official final count, and they are calling for a scrutiny of the ballots.

So what happened here?

Three weeks ago, Colombia held the first round of presidential voting. The early favorite, Paloma Valencia of the right-wing establishment Centro Democrático party, backed by former president Álvaro Uribe, came in third, behind the right-wing outsider Abelardo de la Espriella and the ally of outgoing president Gustavo Petro, Senator Iván Cepeda of the leftist Pacto Histórico (Historic Pact). In Colombia there is an open first round, which can field many candidates, but the top two vote-getters advance to a final round unless one candidate clears 50% plus one.

Most people thought Cepeda would come in first with a unified left, but de la Espriella came in first, Cepeda second, and Valencia third. My take on this is very clear: Colombians were saying that they reject Gustavo Petro’s collectivist socialist experiment, but that they also reject Álvaro Uribe as the flag-bearer for the right. A sort of “we don’t like them, but we don’t like you either.”

So what happened in the past three weeks? Exactly what I expected. The outgoing president’s political machine moved to mass mobilization: get the buses out, get the affinity groups, such as indigenous leaders and unions, to mobilize. Something interesting happened: a government worker I know in immigration was told, and convinced, that she would lose her job if de la Espriella won. Her union told her this, of course. Cepeda and Petro’s movement has counted on its ability to mobilize people through group affiliation, working through organized structures to get out the vote. It was very effective, but not quite enough.

On the other hand, the split vote between Paloma Valencia and Abelardo de la Espriella came together, sort of, but not in a coordinated fashion. There was no real way to mobilize lukewarm people who were not already behind one of those two candidates. The business community had largely already opposed the Petro-Cepeda project, but it does not have the same mobilization machinery in place.

There will be time for a lot more journalism on this, but I want to get this initial reporting out quickly. Beyond that dynamic, what other factors came into play? Several:

• The outgoing president ran his administration like a game of thrones, or some kind of reality show. On average, he was bringing in a new cabinet minister every three weeks. It was nonstop drama and intrigue, and Cepeda’s message of “stay the course” ran up against that.
• Then there was the treatment of Vice President Francia Márquez. Petro used her to try to win the Afro-Colombian vote, but once they were elected, they tried to sideline her and treat her as a token. She rebelled against that and has called out her own administration for its corruption and racism. Over the past four years, Márquez has actually seemed more serious than Petro, who has a habit of crazy talk. By picking Aída Quilcué, Cepeda made it look like more of the same, and, fair or not, it made Quilcué look like a token candidate. Maybe it isn’t fair, but you can blame the Petro administration for creating that environment.
• Uribe’s first candidate choice, Senator Miguel Uribe Turbay (no relation), was assassinated on the orders of, according to Gustavo Petro’s own attorney general, the Segunda Marquetalia, a FARC dissident structure co-founded by Jesús Santrich, who was on his way to being extradited to the United States until that was allegedly blocked by Iván Cepeda’s efforts. Whether or not it is fair, for a lot of people in Colombia this is emblematic of Cepeda’s nurturing approach to the guerrilla groups, which have been growing stronger under the Pacto Histórico’s dialogue-first approach.
• The current administration is stained with several corruption scandals: the UNGRD scandal, in which money meant to bring water to poor, isolated families in the deserts of La Guajira was robbed for a political bribery fund; the ongoing scandals around Ricardo Roa and state petroleum company Ecopetrol (NYSE: EC), where Roa has been charged over alleged campaign-spending violations; the fiasco over the printing of Colombian passports; and a move that really angered the paisas (people of Antioquia and Medellín), the appointment of indicted former mayor Daniel Quintero to a government position supervising the finances of the country’s health system. Here you have a man with something like 40 counts of indictment for corruption, though let me be clear, he has not been convicted yet, and you appoint him to supervise the finances of the country’s primary health system? Usually when people are facing charges, they say something like “I am innocent, but I will resign to focus on clearing my name.” This one went full steam ahead. That undoubtedly cost votes among those who prioritize clean government.
• Cepeda’s running mate, Aída Quilcué, who never went to college, accused graduates of Colombia’s best universities of having “only learned to steal the people’s money.” She tried to walk that back after her statement blew up, but the damage was done. She was clearly attacking people who attended private universities in Colombia, many of which have no elite pretensions and specialize in educating low-income students.

What do I think will happen?

Assuming the vote count is not overturned, de la Espriella will take over the executive branch with no political machinery in Congress, so he will have to negotiate to get anything done. This is not a situation like El Salvador or Venezuela, where you come in and take over the whole government. To its credit, Colombia has strong institutions. Had Cepeda won, he would have come in with the largest bloc of legislators in Congress and might have found it relatively easy to push through his agenda. With de la Espriella, not so much, and I think this is a good thing. Personally, I like divided government as a concept, because it encourages moderation, consensus, and negotiation.

I expect the guerrilla groups to try to seize the initiative, and I expect their violence to increase in the short term as they try to assert their authority. Longer term, I think they are worse off, and they know the military will be after them soon, so they will make what hay they can while the sun shines. Expect them to try to “punish” the country for electing the candidate most hostile to them, a pattern that has already mocked the outgoing government’s “Total Peace” strategy.

Outgoing President Gustavo Petro will not shut up once out of office. He will become a full-time presence on social media and make as much noise as possible in opposition to the incoming administration. Unlike former President Juan Manuel Santos, Petro will be more like Álvaro Uribe, who has remained addicted to the spotlight, to influence, and to the thrill of power. In places where there is a tradition of former presidents ceding the spotlight, he won’t follow it. Petro will take every opportunity to travel around the world and throughout Colombia to speak, as he is entitled to, and to fashion for himself the role of dear father of the oppressed.

Petro and Cepeda and their movement will, if not explicitly then tacitly, reactivate the primera línea (front line), the aggressive activist youth street movement, not a formal organization, that mobilizes, sometimes peacefully and sometimes violently, against whoever opposes the Pacto Histórico. Last night we already saw violence in the low-income areas of Bogotá, and we saw riot police called out in Cali. It is not always that someone gives an order to go out and protest, even though there have been accusations of exactly that, for example against Petro ally and senator Gustavo Bolívar.

Colombian law says the runner-up in the presidential election gets a seat in the Senate, so Cepeda will return to the Senate, where he will lead the opposition. He already has a bloc of some 30 legislators behind him and is a Senate veteran, so he will be a very powerful voice.

What do I hope will happen?

I hope de la Espriella will have a plan to lift up the poor and the marginalized, and Colombia has plenty. He says he will govern for all the people, and I hope so. This was a very polarized election. People who feel excluded from opportunity largely voted for Cepeda and now feel they have lost. De la Espriella has a window of opportunity to do what he said in his election-night speech and govern for all Colombians. I hope he understands that, with less than 50% of the vote, the only mandate he has is for an inclusive, conciliatory approach.

His administration is inheriting a fiscal mess, as the current government has run up the debt. I hope that, along with Vice President-elect José Manuel Restrepo, they can properly manage this and navigate Colombia’s economy through rough times. Because the government will need to find dollars to make these debt payments, the peso will eventually fall, unless the US does something stupid to wreck its own currency. The opposition will try to blame the new administration for this, even though they planted the seeds for these fiscal weeds that will soon sprout.

I hope Colombia becomes safer for Colombians, and that the guerrilla groups, the mafias, and the drug traffickers shrink. It may be utopian to think they will be eliminated in four years, but my hope is that Colombia becomes safer, especially for poor Colombians, who are by far the primary victims of these groups. In recent years, unlike in the old days, the rich have been largely insulated from the depredations of guerrillas and extortionists, but the poor continue to suffer. So I hope de la Espriella goes after these groups, but in a way that respects and protects human rights, something Uribe failed to do during his time in power, leading to many innocent people becoming victims not just of the guerrillas, but of state violence. I sincerely hope, and will be watching closely, that the state becomes a protector of the poor rather than a victimizer of them. Many poor Colombians suffered under Uribe’s watch, and many continue to suffer under the current Petro government, which has simply not protected them from the depredations of groups like the ELN, the Clan del Golfo, and the FARC dissidents.

People to watch

• Armando Benedetti. The interior minister has been Petro’s consigliere, but he also seems to hold some kind of strange power over Petro. The US government, or in other words Donald Trump, placed him on the Clinton List, which will complicate his life personally and professionally once he is out of office.
• Daniel Quintero. The former Medellín mayor is already battling serious corruption charges, and while he found a friend in Gustavo Petro, that protection will no longer be there. There will be no place for him in the incoming government, and he still has to face all these charges. With no power to protect his allies, many of them also indicted, will they turn on him and spill the frijoles?
• Álvaro Uribe. No doubt pleased, he didn’t get his first choice, which was his own candidate, but he and de la Espriella clearly share a fondness, and their families go way back. De la Espriella’s father was a Liberal Party supporter of Uribe, and Uribe rewarded him with a juicy notary appointment decades ago.

A win for the business sector

Objectively, this is a win for the business sector. Business groups like Fenalco and ANDI have expressed their support for de la Espriella, and he has expressed his explicit support for the petroleum and mining sectors. I just don’t see any major businesses or trade groups that came out in support of Cepeda. Certainly Cepeda and Petro have support from individual businesspeople, but as organized industry groups, I just haven’t seen it anywhere.

Anecdotes

The polls closed barely twelve hours ago, and overnight I tried to gather the opinions of a few people. This is not a scientific poll, and to be clear and fair, Finance Colombia is a business-oriented publication, and I simply know a lot more businesspeople and entrepreneurs than I know community organizers and militant activists. So this is not any kind of objective sample; it is simply personal feedback gathered the very night of the election:

• A member of the Wayúu community in La Guajira told me they went for Cepeda, so they are not pleased.
• In a split family, both spouses professionals from humble backgrounds, the husband, a labor lawyer who contracts with the government, went for Cepeda, but his wife, a middle manager at a bank, went for de la Espriella.
• A psychologist who originally voted for Sergio Fajardo in the first round told me she voted blank, because she saw both candidates as extremists, a left-wing extremist versus a right-wing extremist, and she was disgusted at her country’s polarization.
• A police officer commented to me, “Better this loco than the other loco,” meaning he would take de la Espriella but considered both of them crazy. I think this is a common sentiment; it was not an endorsement of one so much as thinking the other was the worse option.
• A domestic worker told me she voted for de la Espriella, hoping he will take action against rising crime and violence.
• There were pro-Cepeda protests and some street violence in the mostly poor southwest of Bogotá, but there were celebrations in parts of the north of the city, and in the high-income El Poblado area of Medellín the celebrations looked like Colombia had just won the World Cup. Even where I live, in a rural area about an hour from Medellín, you could hear spontaneous car parades and firecrackers all through the night.
• Small businesspeople and Colombian investors I know have, to a person, been celebrating.

The most important takeaway, and something Colombians should be proud of, is that they have just held a peaceful, free, and fair election. Not every country can do that. A lot of hard work remains, and a lot can still go wrong. Count on Finance Colombia to bring you timely updates and analysis.