He won convincingly in a second-round run off election today over leftwing candidate Gustavo Petro, a controversial former M-19 guerrilla member and former Bogotá mayor whose populist ideas were unable to gain him a coalition of political support.

Photo: Iván Duque, the new president of Colombia, outlined his economic agenda recently in a televised interview with Bloomberg.

With more than 99% of the votes counted, the Bogotá-born Iván Duque held a 54.0% to 41.8% lead over Petro. The vote count stood at 10.3 million to 8.0 million for the victorious Democratic Center candidate who will assume the presidency from President Juan Manuel Santos in August.

In a polarized election that was fiercely debated all year long, more than 4.2% of the those who voted cast blank ballots — “voto en blanco” — and preferred to vote for neither candidate. In all, there were more than 806,000 “votos en blanco” out of the more than 19 million cast.

The election results are historic in that Duque’s running mate, Marta Lucía Ramírez, will become the first woman to serve as vice president of Colombia. Duque himself, at just 41 years old, will also be the youngest president in more than 100 years.

The outcome will also have a significant impact on the peace process that the government signed with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 2016.

While a key court decision last year ruled that aspects of the historic accord cannot be altered for at least a decade, the 41-year-old Duque has pledged to make major alterations.

Though it remains to be seen exactly what the new president can do to dismantle the agreement, implementation of the deal has continued to lag even under a government more supportive of the process. Simply failing to push implementation forward would represent a major disruption, and changes to its justice and political participation provisions, among other key aspects, could have severe effects on the now-demobilized guerrilla group’s actions going forward.

While no political party controls a majority in Congress, Duque’s Democratic Center party has been working to forge a coalition with the other right-leaning parties. Gaining wide support in the legislative branch could offer Duque wide latitude to carry out his agenda.

Many key economic organizations, labor unions, and private sector stakeholders had publicly offered their support for Iván Duque before today’s election. While he represents potential disruption to the peace process, many more business-minded Colombian were concerned that the uncertainty of the leftist policies of Petro would negatively affect the country’s economic recovery.

The nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew by just 1.8% in 2017, the lowest figure since the height of the global recession in 2009. This followed the disappointing 2.0% growth in 2016.

Between the end of the global crisis and the major drop in oil prices a few years later, the Colombian economy grew by at least 4.0% each year from 2010 to 2014, hitting a high during this stretch of 6.6% in 2011.

Duque has pledged to cut the corporate tax rate below 30%, something he told Bloomberg in an interview would make Colombia more competitive “as we’ve seen other countries in Latin America.”

He added that cutting this tax rate would help “get the economy and investment reactivated and be able to generate the type of employment that we need and also put the target of getting the economic growing above 5% of GDP.”

While many in the private sector are happy with the outcome, critics have also highlighted Duque’s inexperience. While he was elected to serve a first term in the Colombian senate in 2014, his youth and lack of executive experience in any form of government — or even at any organization in the country — has been called a red flag by the opposition.

READ MORE: Iván Duque Wants to Cut the Corporate Tax Rate Below 30% in Colombia

Before becoming a protege to Uribe and running for his Senate seat in 2014, Iván Duque, who holds a law degree from Sergio Arboleda University in Bogotá, was a relative unknown in Colombia who had spent more than a decade previously working for the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington.

In the late 1990s, he also began a stretch serving as an advisor in the Colombian Ministry of Finance and Public Credit under then-President Andrés Pastrana.

This article has been updated with additional information following the final election results.

Duque, the candidate of the Democratic Center party and protege of former President Álvaro Uribe, received nearly twice as many votes as Colombia Humana representative Petro.

The final polls released the week prior to the two-man runoff vote also showed Duque with more than 50% of the support and Petro trailing significantly. Many Colombians, displeased with some of the more extreme position of both men, have indicated they will fill out a blank ballot, or voto en blanco, rather than giving their vote to either.

Among the voto en blanco voters will be Sergio Fajardo, the former Medellín mayor who came in third, narrowly losing out to Petro, in the first round of the election, and Humberto de la Calle, the former vice president and peace negotiator, who placed fifth.

The two defeated, more-centrist candidates have both said they do not support Duque’s pledge to try to unravel key parts of the peace accord signed with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 2016 and the more socialist policies advocated by Petro.

The winner will take over the Casa de Nariño in August from outgoing, two-term President Juan Manuel Santos.

Polls in Colombia are notoriously unreliable, but Duque has experienced what Bloomberg recently categorized as a “meteoric rise” to the “cusp of Colombia’s presidency” in the lead up to the May 27 election.

“Tax rates in Colombia are pretty high … If you ask me about a competitive [corporate] rate, I think it should be below 30% — as we’ve seen other countries in Latin America.” – Iván Duque

The right-wing candidate and former senator’s ascension has largely been attributed to the fact that he was handpicked by former President Álvaro Uribe, who led the country as it beat back the guerrilla threat in the early 2000s and continues to have as much political sway as anyone in Colombia despite ongoing controversy and ever-present allegations of human rights violations from his tenure as a hardline head of state.

While advocates of the country’s peace process, finalized in late 2016 to end a half-century of conflict with leftist FARC rebels, fear that Duque will work to dismantle the accord if he wins the presidency, many in the business world believe he will be good for markets in a nation that has seen sluggish growth for the past two years.

Plenty of analysts, including New York-based credit rating agency Fitch Ratings, believe that Colombia’s stable fiscal policy and market-friendly policies will continue regardless of who takes office. But Duque nevertheless has so far talked the talk more loudly than the rest of the field when it comes to promises of fostering a climate for greater investment and economic growth.

To elaborate on his economic platform, Duque recently sat down with Bloomberg reporters for a televised interview. During the conversation, he explains — albeit without many specifics — that he wants to pursue polices that can get Colombia back toward the 5% annual GDP growth it was experiencing before the price of oil plummeted in 2014.

Among the focus areas to get there, he is pushing for a larger trade relationship with the United States, tax reform that will create a “competitive” corporate tax rate below 30%, a ramped-up fight against tax evasion, and further development of domestic capital markets.

To hear Duque’s comments from his Bloomberg appearance, watch the video here or read the transcript in full below.

Bloomberg: How concerned are you by the apparent turn away from free trade that we’re saying obviously in the U.S. but elsewhere as well?

Iván Duque: I think the concept of trade wars is not good for the world at this moment. We want the U.S. economy to grow, and if the U.S. economy starts growing above 3% that will help emerging markets and it will help Latin American a lot.

But if you start having measures in order to limit free trade — or to put additional tariffs — it would hurt emerging economies. So if you want the whole economy to grow in a comprehensive way, you need to get the biggest economies growing, and don’t blockade the development of the access to free markets.

Bloomberg: What kind of relationship do you foresee Colombia having with the U.S. under President Trump?

Iván Duque: There is an important thing and it is that Colombia has always had bipartisan support. We got support from the Clinton administration, the Bush administration, the Obama administration, and now President Trump is visiting Colombia a few weeks from now. And he’s supporting our anti-drug agenda.

“I want the local capital markets to develop. We need to have more IPOs, and we need to develop new instruments that are attractive for investors.” – Iván Duque

But I also believe that we need to strengthen commercial ties, trade ties. We want Colombia to participate actively in aggregated value chains, and we want also to expand and diversify our export offer to the U.S. That’s part of my goals. Because, as of today, 75% of Colombian exports to the U.S. are limited to very few products. We want to broaden that so that we can have better opportunities of growth in specific sectors.

Bloomberg: So, as I mentioned in the intro, Colombia’s growth right now is not very impressive. Under your Administration what would be the central plank of reviving that growth?

Iván Duque: First of all, tax rates in Colombia are pretty high. When you look at corporate tax rates in Colombia, we’re above the average of OECD member countries, and we’re above Latin America — and even the world average.

So part of the things that I am proposing is to eliminate unnecessary spending, do a reform in central government so that we can be more efficient and use better technology and eliminate duplicities in many works that we have among agencies. And also fighting the tax evasion on VAT and corporate taxes. We can lower the rate, increase investment, and make that the trigger of productivity and new formalization in job creation.

Bloomberg: When it comes to those tax cuts, are the Trump, Bush, or Reagan tax cuts any kind of model for you to look at?

Iván Duque: I don’t think you can have a one-size-fits-all agenda on tax cuts. But I think what we should do in Colombia is definitely become more competitive in tax rates for corporations, because they are the generators of formal labor force.

READ MORE: Petro, Duque To Be Left and Right Coalition Candidates in Colombian Presidential Race

So if you ask me about a competitive rate, I think it should be below 30% — as we’ve seen other countries in Latin America. Chile has undertaken a tax reduction that has been efficient and also Peru. And I think we should follow that trend in order to get the economy and investment reactivated and be able to generate the type of employment that we need and also put the target of getting the economic growing above 5% of GDP.

Bloomberg: You mentioned paying for tax cuts by doing a better job cracking down on tax evasion. How do you actually do that? Because is great to say that you’re going to reduce evasion, but what steps can you take?

Iván Duque: I think the usage of technology — the usage of big data, blockchain — and the supervision of corporate accounting helps a lot. The SUNAT in Peru is doing good work. The tax administration in México is doing good work. And there is a recent study from MIT that showed that the right combination of technology and fiscalization officials can be more efficient in terms of reducing evasion in corporate tax.

And also, on VAT, you need to formalize. And maybe you need to have three levels for taxation for micro, small, medium and large sizes so you can get the right incentives for formalization in the way companies are registered in a country like ours.

Bloomberg: Now, if you look at the equity market, a lot of people use that as a gauge for how the economy is doing. Certainly President Trump likes to do that. Colombia’s benchmark stock index is the world’s worst performer over the last five years, according to Bloomberg data — and we track more than 100 primary indexes here. What do you think has been the root of the problem? Certainly, you could point to in efficiencies in government spending but that’s been the case for a much longer that.

Iván Duque: I think there are two reasons. One is that our development of local capital markets was highly dependent on oil. We had the oil companies being the ones who had more trading in our local capital markets.

READ MORE: Colombian Economy Grew by 2.2% in the First Quarter of 2018

And there are two objectives that I want to achieve. First of all, I want the local capital markets to develop. We need to have more IPOs, and we need to develop new instruments that are attractive for investors, not only on government bonds but all the other areas.